The participants of the User Forum agreed that modern Earth observation and information technologies have a high potential for improving water management in Central Asia as they provide a reliable data-basis, particularly in transboundary river basins. However, a main limitation to the usefulness of online tools in general is the still limited and difficult internet access in many places in Central Asia.

The participants concluded that the crop monitoring provided by WUEMoCA based on land use and yield maps is appropriate for decision making on regional and sub-regional levels. In particular, the information provided at different spatial aggregation levels (province, district, BISA, ISA, WUA, channel command area) is perceived as useful to identify areas with insufficient water supply.

The participants expressed their wish for an operational tool with near-real time data and analyses at monthly or even 10-day intervals. They developed the vision that, in the long-term, the information currently provided at scale of higher water management units should be available at the field level enabling consultation services and management support for individual farms.

WUEMoCA should become part of a larger data and model system, and could be coupled with existing water allocation models such as ASBmm (integrated model for assessment of Aral sea basin development scenarios). An important aspect of WUEMoCA would be the assessment of water use efficiency in irrigated agriculture. This requires the coupling of WUEMoCA with climate and water allocation data (on the ground) as well as water balance models. The users underlined that water use efficiency assessments should be differentiated according to water sources, i.e. river water, channel water, groundwater, and transboundary vs. inland waters.