In recent decades, the effects and intensity of droughts appear to have increased in Latin America and the Caribbean, with multiple social, economic and environmental impacts. The problems imposed by droughts are the subject of urgent palliative actions by the respective governments. These actions, however, may be unsuccessful if management is not accompanied or programmed by relevant information regarding drought processes.

The Midsummer Drought (“La Canícula”) is a recurring event that affects Central America and parts of the Caribbean, reducing rainfall in the middle of the rainy season and threatening vulnerable local communities. Climate change is projected to further intensify the damaging impacts of drought in the region, affecting the availability of water needed for irrigation, human consumption and ecosystems.

The sixth UNESCO (G-WADI)-AGWA-ICIWaRM webinar in a series on Adaptation in an age of uncertainty: tools for climate-resilient water management approaches took place on 27 April 2021. It focused on urban water resilience cases from South America, specifically concerning the coastal delta city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, and the Guadalquivir and Azero basins of Bolivia. Both addressed the impacts of climate change and hydrological extremes and their consequences to urban water management.

The near-real-time precipitation dataset developed by the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS) of the University of California, Irvine, has been updated and improved, as documented in a recent article in the Journal of Meteorology.

The fifth UNESCO (IHP G-WADI)-AGWA-ICIWaRM webinar in a series on Adaptation in an age of uncertainty: tools for climate-resilient water management approaches took place on Wednesday, 10 March 2021. It focused on the climate-water-energy nexus, drawing upon experiences and lessons learned in South Asia.

To better monitor adaptation and resilience-related action, the World Bank’s Action Plan on Climate Change and Resilience has created a “Resilience Rating System” (RRS) for building and tracking resilience to climate change and disaster risks.

Climate Risk-Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) is a bottom-up water resources planning framework that helps us to make better informed decisions in water management under future uncertainty using robust, flexible approaches that can be institutionalized into consistent, replicable, and accessible outcomes. Now this publication is available in Spanish.

The ASADWA International Conference was a joint activity of the UGent based UNESCO Chair of Eremology, the UNESCO Center CAZALAC and the Global Network on Water and Development Information for Arid Lands (G-WADI), and was supported by the Chilean National Comittee of the UNESCO International Hydrological Programme (CONAPHI) and The Catholic University of Valparaiso (UCV). ASADWA is a recognized activity within the Universal Forum of Cultures, organized from October 22 2010 until January 7 2011 in Valparaiso, that promotes sustainable development, as well as knowledge, peace and cultural diversity.

The Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme is beginning the eighth and final year of its eighth phase (IHP-VIII; Water Security), and strategic planning is near completion for IHP-IX, which will cover the period 2022-2029. In conjunction with this transition period, the Inter-Group Coordination Committee of IHP’s FRIEND-Water (Flow Regimes from International Experimental and Network Data) initiative Meeting met on the 25th of November to evaluate their current activities and strategize over future ones. Other IHP initiatives, including G-WADI, were invited to intervene to identify synergies with FRIEND activities.

​​​​​​​As announced in UNESCO’s News stream, on 2nd November 2020, the UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa launched an online course on the G-WADI developed Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) methodology. It was the first course on any topic hosted on the recently developed UNESCO open learning platform. The targeted participants/students come from government officials from the ministries of water, local authorities, engineers, academia and elsewhere.