UN Environment and Google Partner to Monitor Global Surface Water

A Case Study by SDSN TReNDS
on Behalf of Contracts for Data Collaboration (C4DC)

In 2018, UN Environment and Google teamed up to create a global indicator of surface water that has now been incorporated into official Sustainable Development Goal reporting. The collaboration built on satellite derived measures of surface water produced by Google and the European Commission Joint Research Center, filling important data gaps for UN Environment. Although the collaboration involved publicly available data, the partners decided to form a memorandum of understanding, in part to show countries that the data was created through a partnership, and also to secure a long-term commitment to data sharing between Google and UN Environment. The agreement was kept general to provide flexibility, but it served to define the intent of the collaboration, commit to make data products publicly available, and indicate areas of primary responsibility, as well as to clarify the duration of the collaboration and to explain that there was no preferential treatment involved. The project was also enabled by a mutual spirit of cooperation and a collaboratively-developed work plan.

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