About reservoirs.earth
Every reservoir.
Every country.
Fully open.
reservoirs.earth is an independent open-data platform that aggregates official government reservoir storage data from around the world — and makes it freely accessible to anyone who needs it. No login. No paywall. No black box.
Where it started
Why this only existed for Spain
The idea started with embalses.net — the Spanish site that lets anyone check, at a glance, how full the country's reservoirs are. One question kept coming back: why does this only exist for Spain?
Water is one of the most strategically important environmental datasets on the planet, yet there was nowhere to see it the way you check financial markets or the weather — open, current, and comparable across borders. reservoirs.earth is the attempt to build that.
Our mission
Three things we are building towards
Scale — more countries, more data
The world has thousands of significant reservoirs. Most of their storage data is locked inside government portals, incompatible formats, or behind institutional barriers that make global comparison impossible. Our goal is to break down those barriers — reaching 50+ countries in 5 years and 100+ countries in 10 years with verified, machine-readable reservoir level data. We are at 8 today.
Transparency — first-hand data quality insight
Building each country's data pipeline means we encounter the source directly. We know when data is real-time and richly documented, and we know when it is a weekly PDF buried inside a government intranet. That first-hand knowledge of each country's data infrastructure puts us in a unique position: we are not just aggregators, we are witnesses to whether a government is truly open or merely performing openness.
Advocacy — making transparency visible
Awareness drives improvement. By publishing a semi-annual, evidence-based assessment of each country's data openness, we give governments a public benchmark and citizens the tools to hold them accountable. Our goal is not to shame — it is to encourage steady, measurable progress so that the people who depend on reservoirs for drinking water, agriculture and energy have access to the same data that their governments hold.
Our instrument
The Reservoir Transparency Index
That's why we built the Reservoir Transparency Index (RTI) — a semi-annual ranking that scores each country on 7 weighted dimensions of water data openness: from raw data availability and API quality, to historical depth, update frequency and methodological documentation.
By making each evaluation public, evidence-based and auditable in a Git repository, we give governments a clear benchmark and the international research community a stable dataset to track progress over time. The RTI is not a one-off report — it is a living record that gets updated every six months, so improvements (and regressions) are impossible to hide.
View the H1 2026 Reservoir Transparency Index →The person behind it
Founded by
Jaime Delgado Oliveres
Founder, reservoirs.earth
Jaime built reservoirs.earth out of a conviction that water data — one of the most strategically important environmental datasets on the planet — should be as open and comparable as financial or weather data. Starting with Spain, he has spent years reverse-engineering official government data pipelines across multiple continents to make that vision real.
A lawyer by training who taught himself to build, he is exactly the kind of independent maker this moment makes possible: one person, working primary government sources directly and turning them into something comparable. It is a side project built with discipline, not a team or a budget.
That hands-on work — from MITECO's Access databases to IRSA's rolling PDF archives — gives him a ground-level view of exactly where each country's water transparency holds up, and where it quietly breaks down.
LinkedInWhat's next
The road to 100 countries
We currently track 10 countries: Spain, Portugal, United States, Brazil, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, Colombia and Norway. Each new country requires building a dedicated data pipeline against its official sources — scraping, parsing, normalising, validating. It is not fast work, but it is verifiable work.
As coverage grows, so does the RTI. More countries means more comparative pressure — and more proof that open water data is achievable at every level of institutional capacity, from wealthy federal systems to resource-constrained national agencies.
10
Countries today
50+
Target — 5 years
100+
Target — 10 years
Water belongs to the people who live with it — and they deserve to see it clearly.
How much water a country actually holds, how it changes month to month, and what its institutions do with it should be public knowledge — not something buried in agency archives. reservoirs.earth exists so that anyone, anywhere, can understand the water around them, and hold the people who manage it to account.