Curated global dam and reservoir data for all

Global Dam Watch is an international collaboration which aims to improve our understanding of the costs and benefits of dams to our world by providing open access data and tools focused on dams and reservoirs

Dams, reservoirs, and other water management infrastructure provide many benefits, but also generate risks. Dam construction and removal affects progress toward the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) at local to global scales. However,  globally-consistent information on the location and characteristics of these structures are lacking, and information is often highly localised, fragmented, or inaccessible.  

Our mission is to work across disciplines and scales to gather, curate and share high quality open-access, georeferenced regional and global dam data and knowledge. 

We focus on three outputs: 

• the GDW consensus global database brings together our foundational global datasets GOODD, GRAND and FHReD, complemented with data from various other sources, into a single, globally consistent dam and instream barrier data product for global-scale analyses, 

• the GDW directory of existing dam datasets, bringing together the increasingly numerous global, regional, national and local dam and instream barrier datasets

• the GDW intelligence platform is for dam mapping, curation, visualisation and research in support of policy and decision making  at the national and basin scale, globally.  It includes all major open access global and regional datasets, but is curated on demand, by basin or country, and you may have to curate the data  for the country or basin of your interest before use.   

See our open access introductory paper on GDW in Environmental Research for further details of our mission and objectives.

Want to get involved? 

• Add databases that you are aware of to the GDW dam directory

• Add and edit dam attributes  for countries and basins of your interest using GDW dam intelligence

• Reach out  to us from the GDW contact page if you would like to support or join this effort in other ways.  

• Follow us on linked-in, blue-sky and X for  #damoftheweek  and #damsinthenews