International Recommendations for Water Statistics (IRWS) provides coherent principles, concepts and definitions for the collection and compilation of water statistics on a comparable basis. IRWS constitutes the first publication of international recommendations in the field of environment statistics and joins a family of international recommendations published by the United Nations Statistics Division. IRWS is designed to assist all countries in the establishment and strengthening of a multipurpose information system for water in support of integrated water resources management. In particular, it: (a) Supports the collection, compilation and dissemination of internationally comparable water statistics in countries; (b) Supports the implementation of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Water (SEEA-Water); (c) Provides the necessary information for deriving coherent and consistent indicators, enabling comparisons over time and between countries based on an agreed list of data items.