Latin America and the Caribbean face a paradox: it holds a significant portion of the planet's freshwater, yet profound inequalities in access persist, local scarcity is expanding, and there is a growing gap between the commitments of the 2030 Agenda and actual progress. The diagnosis is well-known. What is lacking is not just data, but the institutional capacity to translate it into priorities, investments, and effective public policies. With this conviction, ECLAC launched, in the context of the IX Forum of the Countries of Latin America and the Caribbean on Sustainable Development, two tools designed to close this gap: the Regional Water Profile and the ROSA Observatory ( Network and Observatory for Water Sustainability ).

Ms. Ángela Penagos, Director of the Colombia Office and Head of Water and Biodiversity at ECLAC's Natural Resources Division, opened the event with a key observation that guided the discussion. The region faces not one, but three simultaneous water shortages: physical (overexploited basins under climate stress), polluted (water that exists but has lost quality for human, productive, or ecosystem use), and institutional (regulatory fragmentation, lack of comparable information, and low implementation capacity). This last one is as crucial as the previous two, but is frequently overlooked in policy debates.

Subsequently, Ms. Silvia Saravia Matus, Economic Affairs Officer and Water Officer at ECLAC, added another diagnosis: the water problem in the region is not only one of financing, but also of implementation. There is a double bottleneck : budgeted resources are not being executed at the necessary speed or scale because of a lack of solid hydrological data, risk modeling, project preparation, and monitoring systems that would transform abstract planning into actionable investment portfolios. And in a context where much of the water investment is already private, the role of the State does not diminish; on the contrary, it becomes more urgent , especially to protect small rural producers who cannot absorb these shocks without enabling conditions. 

Ms. Saravia Matus presented two ECLAC tools that share a common logic:

• The Regional Water Profile,  which  offers an integrated reading that goes beyond the SDG 6 indicator report. It cross-references access and sanitation data with household surveys, and measures the economic effort by income quintiles to reveal who pays proportionally more for water, critical information for focusing public investment where it is most needed and for building truly inclusive policies.
• And the ROSA Observatory , which operates at the decision-making level. It was designed to fulfill four functions that no other regional platform covers in an integrated manner: comparing rigorous evidence between countries, identifying territorial gaps, prioritizing public investments, and providing intersectoral monitoring of SDG 6 in its articulation with other development goals. In other words, it is not a passive repository, but rather a tool for the complete public policy cycle, encompassing diagnosis, prioritization, implementation, and monitoring. 

He noted that both platforms are now becoming public, regional water resources, available to countries, built using comparable criteria, and designed to strengthen institutions that make decisions under increasing pressure.

Ms. Saravia Matus concluded her presentation  by mentioning that the next step is political.  The ROSA Observatory and the Regional Water Profile are tools available today. But their value depends on countries integrating them into their actual planning, budgeting, and evaluation cycles. In a region where the implementation gap is as critical as the financing gap, the question is no longer whether there is enough information to act. The question is whether there is the institutional will to use it.

And that is precisely the goal of the ROSA project: that better tools will produce better decisions, and that better decisions will accelerate the water transition that Latin America and the Caribbean can no longer postpone.

Later, Ms. Maya Takagi, FAO Regional Programme Leader, emphasized that agriculture accounts for approximately  73% of global freshwater withdrawals , but the sector's efficiency in the region has grown by only  5% since 2015 , compared to 24% globally. And there is a statistical trap that exacerbates the situation: the region's average water stress appears at just 5.4% (one of the lowest in the world), but this national figure masks areas of medium and high stress, especially on the Pacific coast, which are only visible with disaggregated data at the basin level. Therefore, FAO, as the custodian agency of Target 6.4, promotes tools such as  AQUASTAT  and  WaPOR, satellite remote sensing that measures agricultural water productivity at the plot scale, to produce precisely the kind of evidence that transforms incomplete diagnoses into informed decisions. Ms. Takagi's final message was that "Without sustainable water, there is no zero hunger. SDG 6 (water and sanitation) and SDG 2 (zero hunger and sustainable agriculture) are two sides of the same challenge."

The day concluded with a joint call from the leaders of ECLAC and FAO, who together urged a shift towards water governance that recognizes water as a common good and a driver of productive development. This requires moving beyond fragmented diagnoses and parallel agendas. Synergistic progress between SDG 6 and SDG 2 is not a long-term aspiration, but an operational necessity that already has the tools, evidence, and institutional will to be achieved.

Finally, the event participants positively valued the launch of the Water Profile and the ROSA Observatory, mentioning in the exit survey that both tools are useful inputs for the formulation of public policies and indicated that the session contributed to strengthening their understanding of the use of water indicators for policy design ( 73.7% strongly agreed and 26.3% agreed ). 

Regarding specific strengthened capacities,  68.4%  strengthened their understanding of the water-agriculture-food nexus for decision-making;  42.1%  the use of Water Profile indicators to prioritize and identify gaps; and  31.6%  the use of inputs from the ROSA Observatory to identify financing alternatives.