UNESCO's International Conference on Climate Risk, Vulnerability and Resilience Building is Major Success

UNESCO's “International Conference on Climate Risk, Vulnerability and Resilience Building“, held on April 19-21, 2023, was attended by over 800 people, from governmental, non-governmental, academic and business sectors. G-WADI was an essential organizing partner.

The conference, which aimed at bridging the gap between science, policy and decision-making to support effective resilience building, grew out of activities related to the UNESCO-ICIWaRM publication on Climate Risk-Informed Decision Analysis, or CRIDA.  Many of these activities were supported by the UNESCO project "Enhancing Climate Services for Improved Water Management" (CliMWaR), funded by the Flemish-UNESCO Fund for Science (FUST), which aims to provide reliable climate services to monitor and forecast droughts and floods at the local level to improve national risk management strategies and to lower the impact of water-related hazards on vulnerable communities in pilot regions of LAC and Africa.

G-WADI members were on the conference steering committee, spoke in most of the sessions, and led the session on Monitoring the impacts of hydroclimatic risks and early warning systems. Others spoke at sessions such as Streamlining CRIDA into adaptation processes and CRIDA 2.0: Lessons learnt and Way Forward. These latter sessions provided many ideas for incorporating CRIDA into the Ninth Phase of the Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme over the next seven years.

In addition to UNESCO's Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme and the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA)--the primary organizing partners--the International Center for Integrated Water Resources Management (ICIWaRM) played a major role in organizing, reviewing submissions and participating in sessions.