The Atlas on Water Cooperation refers to an empirically based tool thought to analyze the interactions between biophysical and socio-economic factors able to influence cooperation or tensions over water in shared watersheds. The idea was to develop a tool able to monitor availability, uses and abuses of water and water-stressed hot spots at national and regional scales. This is not only directed at analyzing water supply and demand, as for a water stress indicator, but also the socio-economic, institutional, legal, and cultural context evolutions that are likely to influence the hydro-political tensions or cooperation.

The aim of this product is to provide the policy maker with a flexible instrument able to capture historical and current trends of factors relevant for water related issues, but also the possibility to interactively construct future scenarios and eventually simulate different sets of policy options and strategies. The first step of this project consists of a global analysis is based on the global assessment of water related issues and their correlates in the interactions between countries sharing transboundary watersheds. To perform this analysis is required the information about the bi-lateral interactions of the countries sharing the existing 276 international river basins (IRCC database). On a second step, the project will focus on a regional scale, creating a database with the available information related to water, energy and food cooperation to support a regional African Atlas, and integrating it into a GIS to analyze the impacts of water-related disaster and water availability on water quality, health, access to water and energy/agriculture production.

The designed graphical tool is organized to interactively display: maps, map controls, operation widgets, layers panels, and charting tools. The instrument is designed to be extremely flexible and user friendly. The information is visualized at the river basin level or at raster level when available. Data about biophysical and socio-economic variables are displayed as either raster or vectorial layers. The tool provides the controls needed to display the evolution on the data over time.