BLUE-THUMB-UP is an Online free web tool that provides easy access to information to improve productivity and sustainability of water use in farms at any location in the world.

We have developed BLUE-THUMB-UP to show that global data, models and field level information can be combined in a web-platform to provide advice to farmers on the water needs of their crops and if irrigation is required.

For one year now, in GSI we've been working for the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) secretariat, carrying out the practical implementation of the AWS standard in “Iberesparragal”, a citrus farm in the Guadalquivir basin (Spain), in collaboration with the German supermarket chain EDEKA and WWF. The implementation, which has covered 3 of the 6 steps of the AWS standard so far, is providing key learnings and showing the value of the practical use of different tools to help implementers working towards Water Stewardship.

Recently, theUniversity of Twente,UNEP and Good Stuff International collaborated in order to apply theWater Footprint Assessment (WFA) for the first time to the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) subcontinent. A comprehensive accounting on water footprints per sector was produced, as well as a water footprint sustainability analysis.

Diego Arevalo van GSI-LAC interviewt Nelson Omar Vargas, Hoofd Hydrologie van IDEAM (Hydrologisch, Meteorologisch en Milieu Instituut van Colombia). Hij vertelt over de voordelen en het toekomstig perspectief van de Water Voetafdruk bepaling van alle Colombiaanse stroomgebieden in het kader van de Nationale Water Studie (ENA) in Colombia. 

Diego Arevalo (GSI-LAC) interviews Nelson Omar Vargas, head of the Hydrology section of IDEAM, who explains the benefits of the inclusion of the Water Footprint Assessment in the 2014 Colombian national water study (ENA), as well as its future perspectives.

Good Stuff International is sincerely happy that the proposal with options for establishing the Lake Victoria Environmental Trust Fund (LVETF) has been approved and endorsed by the LVBC partner states and EAC stakeholders.

For VECO East Africa, GSI executed a desktop analysis of the water use and availability data of the Lower Moshi Irrigation scheme in Northern Tanzania. Using publicly available data and open source tools, GSI delineated the watershed of the irrigation scheme, assessed the monthly water requirement and modeled the monthly water availablity scenarios. 

The USDA Forest Service is assessing the water footprint of the Tenmile river basin located in the Helena National Forest. The objective is to understand the vulnerability of the Tenmile basin by making a founded comparison between the blue water consumption with the blue water availability.

Cities often not contribute so much to health. People breath polluted air. Water is often nearly undrinkable. Food might be of low quality. Waste lies around and people might feel unsafe. While it is not the whole solution, urban farming makes life in cities better in many aspects.

The State of Nature in the EU report says that especially the European freshwater environment and its species are in a worrying state. The trend is that the pressures on freshwater will increase resulting in negative effects on society and economy. Ultimately these effects will need to be managed leading to higher costs. It is clear to experts that good water management is the best investment to counter this situation. But this is not so clear to most European citizens, civil servants, business people and politicians.

Results from the Water Footprint Assessment applied to the Porce river basin, Colombia, show that the basin has no blue water stress, but it does undergo significant levels of green water scarcity (competition for different uses of land and green water resources) and water pollution in some of Porce’s subbasins.

Has it happened to you that you start investigating the water situation of a catchment and very quickly you realise that there is so much information that you just do not have the time to follow everything, or perhaps it is difficult to grasp the catchment overview for organising a strategic water planning? - The Water Intelligence service refers to a geographic snapshot and strategic summary of the water situation in the catchment(s) and provides a matrix of opportunities in relation to the commodity of interest.

In June 2018, the citrus farm Iberesparragal, in Spain, achieved the first gold certification under the AWS standard in Europe and one of the first ones in the agricultural sector worldwide.

As a component of GSI's project with the Alliance for Water Stewardship, we supported the whole implementation process at Iberesparragal by applying the WaterData4Action approach. The result is a practical case study from which different achievements and learnings can be extracted.