Partners with Circle of Blue, Columbia Water Center, University of California Irvine, and Pacific Institute, with data support from Twitter, to uncover groundwater data insights to drive action toward long-term sustainability
As featured during the plenary session on climate and resiliency at the 2015 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting, Qlik®, a leader in visual analytics, and 
its CEO Lars Bj örk, announced a new multi-year CGI Commitment to Action to address water availability and quality issues across the globe. By helping to inform and impact important water decisions such as allocation, policy changes, crisis response, and infrastructure improvements, Qlik and its partners will collaborate on a ground breaking comprehensive visualization dashboard leveraging the Qlik analytics platform to unite historical big data, real-time information, on-the-ground reportage, and public engagement.
The world’s demand for fresh water is growing while water scarcity is disrupting energy production, triggering food shortages, upending economic development, and threatening political stability. The urgent impacts are felt from the U.S., which lost a full point of GDP in 2012 due to a severe, ongoing drought, to Asia, the Middle East and South America, where drought and floods triggered serious disruptions and political unrest.
Qlik’s commitment, “Groundwater: Data to Drive Action Toward Sustainability,” was selected as an exemplary approach to aggregating data on an open, visual platform that will impact important global decisions that underpin food abundance or shortages, energy production or shut-down, and tranquility or friction among people. According to The World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2015, “water crises” rank as the top global risk of greatest impact and are emerging as serious threats to people, business, the environment, and political stability across the world. Qlik’s recognition stems from CGI’s Commitments to Action, where members are encouraged to propose concrete plans to address global challenges as a means of translating practical goals into meaningful results.
“Qlik is proud to be a member of CGI and to work with our partners to lead an initiative to support some of the most important decisions facing our planet around the availability or lack of fresh water,” said Lars Björk, CEO at Qlik. “Our capacity to respond is in doubt unless we dig deep into the connections and combine the best of reporting, data gathering, and participation to understand the whole story of the challenges and responses. We need to activate the best, most creative thinking to understand and respond. We’re excited to help identify opportunities to advance the solutions to the challenges facing our world.”
Circle of Blue, the team of award-winning journalists and researchers reporting on water and worldwide resource issues, has been a Qlik “Change Our World” grant customer for five years. Last year, Circle of Blue and Qlik teamed up to produce a data dashboard that visualizes current and past levels of California water reservoirs to support the White House Climate Data Initiative.
“We face a time when climate change is stressing our water, food and energy systems, causing billions of dollars of disruptions and testing human and ecological resilience globally,” said J. Carl Ganter, managing director of Circle of Blue and member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Water. “In the current era of mass data streaming and unprecedented data flow, we simply cannot afford to keep the realities of today’s environmental challenges locked in static documents or silo’d collections.” Ganter is recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Award for combining compelling narratives with strategic data.
Qlik’s CGI commitment partners include Circle of Blue, Columbia Water Center, University of California Irvine, Pacific Institute, and social media data support from Twitter. Qlik will provide visual data dashboards driven by Qlik Sense®, a public deployment infrastructure leveraging the Qlik® Cloud, and large scale data management, acquisition, and sharing capabilities through Qlik® Data Market. For the first time, policy makers, corporations, and the public will be able to access and visualize scientific and technical information in an aggregated dashboard supporting analysis for sound and balanced decision making.
This multi-partner commitment will launch with a pilot data visualization application of groundwater supplies and related water flows in California and the American West. The commitment will expand its scope to national and then to global groundwater supplies, providing a visual, trusted, cumulative, and collaborative resource for decision makers, researchers, media, and the public. Continuous surveying and detailed monitoring will take place over the course of the three-year commitment to drive enhancements that ensure the dashboards’ validity, value, and impact upon the world’s growing conversation to drive action to sustain vital groundwater supplies.
While attending the CGI Annual Meeting, Lars Björk also served on a panel titled “Hacking the Solution: Connecting Experts From Technology and International Development”, which addressed opportunities to adapt information and communications technologies for developing country contexts.
