Better understanding the world’s surface water: a new interactive tool to guide European and global policies

On 12 December 2016, the European Commission announced the launch of a co-produced interactive tool comprising 3 million satellite images which had been gathered over the previous 32 years.

The Global Surface Water Explorer was to be accessible to everyone and serve to enhance European and global policies such as in the fields of climate change and water management.The images showed that, although the overall amount of surface water had increased worldwide, remarkable losses had been experienced in certain Asian regions.