News

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.

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.