There is a critical gap between how we understand and monitor the ways we are altering the world’s freshwater ecosystems — and how those changes impact people. The Freshwater Health Index measures the overall health of a watershed by making clear connections between the ecosystem and the benefits it provides to people.
How it works
The Freshwater Health Index (FHI) allows resource managers, engineers, policy makers and other stakeholders to evaluate scenarios, understand tradeoffs, prioritize interventions and communicate basin health with a broad audience by:
- Transforming data into commonly scaled indicators (on a 0-100 scale), providing a baseline diagnosis of a basin’s health.
- Tracking freshwater health over time through an iterative process between scientists, end-users and other stakeholders for a result that is salient, credible and useful.
- Evaluating potential impacts from climate change, land-cover change, population growth and water allocation decisions.
Because the FHI helps make trade-offs more explicit, it can help direct policies and practices that maintain healthy watersheds into the future.
Scale and Scope
The Freshwater Health Index is intended to be applied at the drainage basin scale, where resource management decisions are most relevant and decision support is likely to be most useful, but it can also be applied at smaller or larger scales. It can also be adapted to meet socio-political, economic and ecological variations as well as data availability and informational needs.