Water-Quality Map
Tap any place — see live water-quality conditions and the open-source treatment techniques that fit. Country shading from WHO/UNICEF (drinking-water access) and FAO (freshwater stress); live disasters from GDACS; real-time water-quality readings from USGS gauges. All refreshed every 15 minutes.
Opens on a top-5 worst region for the active indicator. Use search or the worst-list to explore your own region.
Act now — what you can do
Curated, link-out-only. Pick a country on the map to see actions tailored to its situation.
Worst by indicator
Top 12 countries on the active indicator. Click a row to fly there and see techniques.
Live water disasters
Floods, droughts, and tropical cyclones from GDACS (UN OCHA + JRC). Click any event for recommended actions. Recent (<7 d) events are highlighted on the map.
Loading current disasters…
My action log 0
A private record of the things you’ve marked done or set a reminder for. Saved only in your browser; nothing is uploaded. The point is to turn one-shot intent into a habit.
Your pins 0
Saved only in your browser (localStorage). Nothing is uploaded. Export to back up or share by file.
Browse the open technique catalog (24 techniques)
Each technique is community- or household-scale and pairs with at least one freely accessible reference (CAWST, Eawag/Sandec, SSWM, WHO, EPA, IRC…). Click any card for details.
How this portal works
- Country shading shows live data fetched per visit:
- Drinking-water access gap — WHO/UNICEF JMP via Our World in Data.
- Freshwater-withdrawal stress — FAO AQUASTAT (UN SDG 6.4.2) via Our World in Data.
- Click anywhere to see techniques. The recommender derives need signals (drinking-water gap, water stress, disaster proximity, climate band) and ranks the catalog by use-case match plus simplicity.
- Live disasters come from GDACS (UN OCHA + JRC). The popup ranks the techniques most likely to be useful for that disaster type. Use the time-window chips to focus on the last 7 / 30 / 90 days; recent (<7 d) markers render larger.
- US gauges (USGS) show every USGS NWIS site that reported temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, specific conductance, or turbidity in the last hour. Green = all readings in expected range, yellow = one out-of-range, red = two or more. Click any gauge for the latest values and a deep link to the official USGS site page.
- Freshness. The three live feeds above (indicators, disasters, USGS) are pulled on a 15-minute schedule, normalized into a single tiny payload, and served to every visitor. The browser only ever talks to our own server for them. Result: sub-15-minute freshness, one upstream call per refresh window regardless of audience size, deliberately negligible running costs.
- Drinking-water taps (OSM) is an opt-in layer. Toggle it on (or click Reload taps in view) to query OpenStreetMap for public taps in the current map view. Cached in your browser for 24 h.
- Your pins live in your browser’s local storage. Use Export JSON to back them up or share with someone you trust.
- No accounts. No tracking. No upload. Outbound calls from the browser: our own server (live data), OpenFreeMap (basemap), and OpenStreetMap (only if you opt in to taps).
Sources: country borders — Natural Earth (public domain); basemap — OpenFreeMap & OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); drinking-water access — WHO/UNICEF JMP (CC BY 4.0) via Our World in Data; water stress — FAO AQUASTAT / UN-Water SDG 6.4.2 (CC BY 4.0) via Our World in Data; live disasters — GDACS (UN OCHA + JRC), refreshed every 15 min; real-time US water-quality gauges — USGS NWIS Instantaneous Values (public domain), refreshed every 15 min; public drinking-water taps — OpenStreetMap contributors via the Overpass API (ODbL); rendering — MapLibre GL JS (BSD-3); technique catalog assembled from open-access references including CAWST, Eawag/Sandec, SSWM, WHO, US EPA, IRC WASH.
National figures hide local realities. Switching to local crisis data requires sub-national surveys; for the United States, see the EPA ECHO Drinking Water Dashboard; for elsewhere, ask local authorities. See methodology.