The growing water crisis increasingly poses a threat to livelihoods, economies, and global security. Organisations including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and the High-Level Panel on Water have all added their voice to these concerns. In response, the Water, Peace and Security (WPS) partnership is designing innovative tools and services that can identify developing water-related security risks. These innovative tools and services are able to show short term water shortage changes and impacts, and link them to social, political, economic, and hydrological factors. This leads to evidence-based actions that allow risks to be addressed, and human insecurity prevented or mitigated.

Part of the role of Deltares within WPS is the provision of new global data to support global scale assessments of water-related conflict risks, and to use global data to develop regional level models to understand water-related risks in more detail and test interventions that could reduce these risks. Using global data for such models allows a rapid zooming in into areas with potential risks.

The project acts both on a global level and at a regional level, which could be at (sub) basin, (sub) national, or supranational scale, depending on the water-related conflict situations. Regional work in 2018 and 2019 was  conducted in the countries of Mali and Iraq.