Lebanon and Jordan are exploring the possibility of joining the UNECE Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes (Water Convention). To assist the two countries in this process, UNECE and the Global Water Partnership - Mediterranean (GWP-Med), with financial support provided by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), have organised national workshops to increase awareness and understanding of relevant stakeholders of the different legal and institutional frameworks for cooperation on shared waters resources, the specificities of the UNECE Water Convention, in comparison to the UN Watercourses Convention, as well as the complementarity of the two agreements.
The World Water Day was commemorated in Uganda on Monday, 23 March 2015. The celebration ceremony took place at the new premises of the Directorate of Water Resources Management in Entebbe under the theme of Water and Sustainable Development.
GWP has supported the consultation process of francophone youth from 21 countries in the creation of a White Paper, which expresses the role of youth in the management of water in the context of climate change. The paper was presented at COP21 in Paris last year. GWP Central America and partners have now launched a contest for youth based on the recommendations of the White Paper.
Conventions have been with the CWP of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger to allow the implementation of pilot projects in the countries during 2016 and continue the consultation meetings of national and regional platforms in the area of Integrated Drought Management.
The Project Manager has seized the opportunity and visited the pilot villages in the rural town of Gouendo in Mali where Mr. Boureima DIARRA, the mayor of the rural town said that "It is always better to teach us how to fish than to give us the fish".
The 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP21) adopted a new climate agreement in Paris, France, on 12 December. GWP welcomes the landmark agreement, which was signed by nearly 200 countries, and is committed to support it.
Water resources are sensitive to variation in climatic pattern. Climate change is likely to intensify extreme weather event including droughts, floods and tropical storms. It is a fact in Indonesia that sustainability of freshwater is already threatened by severe watershed degradation, pollution, and over-allocation. Furthermore climate change will aggravate these threats to a point of irreversibility if no counter measures.
Coinciding with the meeting of the GWP Steering Committee (SC), a High Level Roundtable on Water Security and the SDGs was held in Yangon, Myanmar on May 24, 2016.