Sources & methods
Last updated 19 August 2026
Every number on this site comes from a published, citable source. This page lists all of them, what each was used for, its vintage, and the terms it is used under.
Where a dataset could not be obtained in machine-readable form, figures were transcribed by hand from the publication and are labelled as curated on the page where they appear. Nothing here is modelled, estimated or generated by us.
| Dataset | Used for & vintage | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| TFDD — International River Basin register & Treaties Database Oregon State University, Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database |
Basin polygons, riparian country lists, 882 treaties 1820–2023, treaty depth per basin. Vintage: Register current to the 2016 update; treaties to 2023. |
Not copyrighted (as stated by the publisher). Credit: "Product of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, Oregon State University." |
| Transboundary Aquifers of the World, 2025 edition IGRAC / UNESCO-IHP |
All 426 transboundary aquifer polygons, lithology, data-reliability assessment, SDG 6.5.2 reporting status. Vintage: 2025 edition. |
Used with attribution to IGRAC/UNESCO. |
| Water Conflict Chronology Pacific Institute, Oakland, CA |
The conflict timeline and the per-story 'shadow record' strips: 2,758 events classified as trigger, weapon or casualty. Vintage: Updated November 2025, covering events through 2024–early 2025. |
Non-commercial use permitted with citation. Cited as: Pacific Institute (2025) Water Conflict Chronology. Pacific Institute, Oakland, CA. Commercial use requires a separate licence from the Pacific Institute. |
| SDG indicator 6.5.2 UN Statistics Division / UN-Water (series EG_TBA_H2CO) |
Percentage of each country's transboundary basin area covered by an operational cooperation arrangement, in the country lens and cooperation gauge. Vintage: 2017, 2020 and 2023 reporting rounds; latest reported value per country. |
Open UN data; custodian agencies UNECE and UNESCO. |
| AQUASTAT — external water dependency ratio FAO |
Share of a country's renewable water resources originating outside its borders, in the country lens and the story dependency maps. Vintage: Curated subset, transcribed manually. |
FAO AQUASTAT, attributed. |
| Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas World Resources Institute |
Baseline water-stress banding on the story maps. Vintage: Aqueduct 4.0. |
CC BY 4.0 — attribution to WRI. |
| International RBO Database Schmeier (2013), Oregon State University |
The river-basin organisation directory. Vintage: 2013 vintage — labelled as such on the page. |
TFDD / Schmeier, attributed. |
| International water events (BAR scale) TFDD International Water Events Database, Oregon State University |
The cooperation-versus-conflict balance per basin. Vintage: 7,128 events, 1948–2008. The series ends in 2008 — recent tension is carried separately by the Pacific Institute record. |
Not copyrighted; credit to TFDD/OSU. |
| Convention party lists UN Treaty Collection — UN Watercourses Convention (1997) and UNECE Water Convention (1992) |
The membership badges in the country lens. Vintage: As of 2024. Positive memberships only — absence is not asserted. |
Public treaty status information. |
| Natural Earth Natural Earth (public domain) |
Country outlines beneath every map on the site. Vintage: 110m cultural vectors. |
Public domain — no restrictions. |
Photographs are from Wikimedia Commons and are credited individually in the caption beneath each image, naming the photographer and licence (public domain, CC BY, or CC BY-SA as applicable). Video footage is stock material used under a licence permitting free commercial and non-commercial use without attribution.
The atlas is a static site: every page is generated ahead of time by a small set of Python scripts that read the source datasets and write HTML. There is no database and no server-side code. Maps are drawn in the browser from the real source geometry using d3-geo — the shapes you see are the published polygons, not illustrations.
Two conventions worth knowing. First, "no treaty on record" means the consulted database holds none, which is itself a finding, not proof that none exists. Second, where a story map shows a figure for a specific country, that figure was transcribed from the publication cited beneath the map — the underlying gridded datasets (water stress, groundwater storage, population) are not redistributed here.
If a source is misrepresented, out of date, or missing, we want to know. Corrections are made promptly and noted. A contact address will be published here shortly.