The scope and detailed outline of the Phase II Nexus Assessment for the Drin river basin, together with related activities, were presented and discussed in the 7th Drin Stakeholders Conference and 18th Drin Core Group Meeting held in Tirana, Albania on 29-30 January 2020. It follows up on the Phase I Nexus Assessment that was completed in 2019 as part of the Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis (TDA) for the Drin river basin.
12 August was designated International Youth Day by the UN General Assembly in 1999, and serves as an annual celebration of the role of young women and men as essential partners in change, and an opportunity to raise awareness of challenges and problems facing the world’s youth.
The International Symposium on “Water and Culture: Learning from Water Heritage to Innovate Regional Development” was held on 3 February in Tokyo, Japan. The aim was to achieve a deeper understanding of relations between people and water by visiting water heritage around the world. About 260 people from 43 countries participated, among those GWP Chair Howard Bamsey and GWP Technical Committee Chair Jerome Delli Priscoli. Dr. Delli Priscoli shared reflections from the U.S. experience on water resources.
GWOPA’s Julie Perkins talks about the role of water operators and explains why everyone should submit their change journey to the Water ChangeMaker Awards, get recognition and share their solutions with the rest of the world. “The very courageous and visionary people and institutions, who have taken bold leadership to climate action should really be credited with this”.
The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are a powerful framework for laying out priorities for national climate action, with the potential to guide priorities such as building climate resilience and climate-resilient infrastructure. They can be developed into country-level strategies and/or approaches for mobilising finance for climate resilient infrastructure programmes and projects and for enhancing the necessary policy and regulatory frameworks. The first window of opportunity ahead is the submission of new or updated NDCs in 2020.
Social inclusion and gender equality are long-established, core values of the GWP Network and manifested in the GWP Gender Strategy and the GWP Gender Action Piece. In a series of inter-regional discussions, GWP Senior Gender & Social Inclusion Specialist Liza Debevec sets out to identify what GWP as an institution can do to apply the concepts in these documents. Her first discussion is with Amy Sullivan and Andrew Takawira, who are both involved in a large Pan-African project on gender transformative water and climate investment. The discussion topic is institutional leadership and commitment, which is the first of 4 action areas in the Gender Action Piece. Their message is clear: leadership makes all the difference.
