G-WADI and five UNESCO Category 2 Centers organized a session titled “Transboundary cooperation for improved data sharing, flood and drought mitigation, and river basin management” at the Third Cairo Water Week, held 18-22 October 2020. About 80 people participated virtually. 

The second webinar in the series, “Climate-Resilient Water Management Approaches: Adaptation in an Age of Uncertainty”, was held on Thursday, 24 September and hosted by UNESCO. It was titled, “Incorporating Climate Risks into Decision Making through CRIDA: Perspectives from Zambia and Chile”. About 220 people participated. 

The USAID Resilient Waters Program’s goal is “to build more resilient and water secure Southern African communities and ecosystems through improved management of trans-boundary natural resources and increased access to safe drinking water and sanitation services.” Recently the program discovered that UNESCO G-WADI’s Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) approach to water management can help strengthen the ability their partner institutions to respond to climate change. CRIDA provides bottom-up, stepwise planning guidance for water resources planners, managers, and engineers to incorporate resilience into their planning and operational decisions.

California’s $3.2 trillion economy—ranked 5th globally if it were a country—depends greatly on water. Water for agriculture, water for drinking, water for power, and water for ecosystems. California’s Water Plan has a broad and diverse portfolio of recommended actions to address its many often conflicting water challenges—flood risk, surface- and groundwater supplies, and habitat and species resiliency. And this delicate water balance is potentially threatened by climate change. 

Over the past ten-plus years, various organizations have developed a set of complementary resilient water management tools and approaches that work to address climate risks and other uncertainties in a manner that can be integrated within existing planning, design, and operational decision processes. These “bottom-up approaches” differ from the original paradigm guiding water management for the past half-century — namely the assumption that we can use past hydrological and climatic data to confidently predict (and plan for) the future.

A Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) based case study in the Limarí River basin in Chile has been published in the journal Climate Risk Management. The Limarí River basin CRIDA study assessed the impact of climatic and non-climatic drivers on the water security of using a climate stress test on a vulnerable mountain catchment in Chile, to identify water security hazards under climate change projections. By engaging local stakeholders early in the process through a collaborative, bottom-up approach, the performance indicators and the critical thresholds were identified beyond which significant economic impacts occur. 

A Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) Workshop was held in Hazyview, northeastern South Africa during 11-12 March 2020.  It was organized and funded by Kruger National Park and led by UNESCO G-WADI. Additional support came from UNESCO's CliMWaR project, with funding from the Government of Flanders.

UNESCO G-WADI and Princeton Climate Analytics have developed a new Flood and Drought Monitoring and Forecasting system for Mozambique & Zimbabwe with a 0.05° (∼5 km) resolution. The system is based on the continental African Flood and Drought Monitor (AFDM), which has been updated to a higher resolution near real-time system using a combination of existing datasets used in the operational AFDM and newly available datasets. The product is intended to provide advance warning of impending floods and droughts.

Climate Risk-Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) and related risk-based water management approaches were featured at the various events at the 25th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP25). The CRIDA methology was jointly developed by UNESCO-IHP and its G-WADI major initiative, the International Center for Integrated Water Resources Management(ICIWaRM), the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA), Deltares, the University of Massachusetts, and the World Bank, and was co-published by ICIWaRM and UNESCO.

G-WADI collaborators Phu Nguyen and Hamed Ashouri, both of the University of California, Irvine's Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing, have been co-awarded the 2019 WCRP/GCOS International Data Prize "in recognition of innovation and excellence in the preparation and provision of climate data." Michel Rixen, Senior Scientific Officer of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), stated that the Prize Committee “was greatly impressed by their strong profile and the high quality of their contribution to the development of climate data sets.”