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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.”

On November 18 at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, a digital interactive exhibition titled “Droughts in the Anthropocene” was kicked off as a side event to the fortieth session of the UNESCO General Conference. The exhibition was displayed from November 18-27. It will also be displayed at the 25th Conference of the Parties (COP 25) of the UNFCCC. The exhibition uses case studies from around the world to showcase the social, environmental and cultural impacts of droughts and water scarcity.

Under the auspices of UNESCO and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, selected national practitioners in Eastern Africa met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from 8th to 10th October 2019 to receive training on the application of state-of-the-art methods for drought monitoring and forecasting. Participants came from the Ministry of Water/Agricultural/Meteorological departments from IGAD and EAC Countries. The workshop was led by water experts and scientists from Princeton Climate Analytics (Princeton University (USA), UNESCO International Hydrology Programme (IHP) and others.

A “Regional Training Regional Workshop on Remotely Sensed Observation of Precipitation Using Artificial Intelligence” was held at the American University of Beirut (AUB, Lebanon) on 8-15 October 2019. It was organized by UNESCO’s Regional Bureau for Science for the Arab States in partnership with the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing at the University of California, Irvine (CHRS) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA). The instructors included Soroosh Sorooshian, Kuolin Hsu and Phu Nguyen of CHRS, along with Bisher Imam, Regional Hydrologistand Senior Programme Specialist for the Regional Bureau.