The relevance of ethical issues in water policy has always been present in the activities of the WO. For instance, a chapter is devoted to the topic in the book of Llamas and Hernández-Mora (2001). In 2000, a symposium to discuss the issue of water ethics was organized in Almeria. Its conclusions were adopted by the “Ethics of freshwater use” group of the COMEST-UNESCO. This group published the UNESCO Water Ethics Series in 2004, which consists of 13 monographs.
Other Water Observatory publications on this topic include the “Water ethics” book in 2009, the Water Policy Journal Special Issue in 2012 and the book on “Integrated Water Resources Management in the 21st century: Revisiting the paradigm“ published in 2014.
In 2013 the WO was invited to join the Water Ethics Charter initiative sponsored by UNESCO among other entities.
Finally, the WO has been informally collaborating with Transparency International Spain since 2000, which has led to the analysis of transparency in the Spanish inter-community basins. Four annual editions of the so-called INTRAG have been published. A similar initiative has been undertaken by the University of São Paulo, in Brazil, and the University of Lisbon, in Portugal. The comparison of these assessments has been published in an article in the International Water Governance Journal.
Currently, the WO is advancing in the data access and reusability analysis, from an open data perspective. A workshop on the state of the art on open data in the water sector was held in December 2016 and a report, deepening the results of that seminar, was published in 2018.
