News & Comment

Sandra Postel has worked for many years on the conservation of the environment with a focus on water, primarily as the founding director of the Global Water Policy Project. Nature Water talked to her about her vision of a holistic approach to meeting challenges related to the preservation of life in our natural environment, with water at its heart.

The alarmingly slow progress on water-related goals and targets jeopardizes the entire sustainable development agenda. In March 2023, the United Nations (UN) convened the first UN Water Conference in nearly 50 years to create momentum and accelerate progress. The outcome of the conference will feed into the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), which will be held in New York on July 10–19, 2023. Nature Water asked five experts about the challenges to meet the goals and where we need to go from here.

The surface water and ocean topography mission, known as SWOT tracks Earth’s surface water with unprecedented accuracy and completeness, improving our understanding of water under the changing climate. Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer is program manager of Ocean Physics, lead of Climate Variability and Change at NASA headquarters, program scientist of SWOT and co-founder of a non-profit organization for research in Earth science. In her conversation with Nature Water, she speaks about what SWOT will bring and why SWOT matters.