Search

Water security in many urban areas is under threat due to the stresses of population growth, urbanisation, water pollution, the over-abstraction of groundwater, water-related disasters, and climate change. Current planning and management have proven insufficient to address the challenges of water security. There is a need for a paradigm shift, which was introduced during a GWP workshop attended by more than 200 participants at Asia Water Week on 13 March in Manila, Philippines.

A series of 22 country consultations took place from February to May 2013 to address the importance of water to national development. These national stakeholder consultations were part of the process taking place to listen to country needs and priorities regarding the post-2015 agenda for water and sustainable development.

The Round Table "National Consultations on water in the post-2015 development agenda" was held on 11 March 2013 in Tashkent (the ICWC Training Center), Uzbekistan.

Encouraged by regional developments, Mali initiated the process to implement IWRM. This was done in three stages: 1) a project team and a Steering Committee were set up to define the management and steering framework of the project, 2) a situation analysis was developed and discussed with broad stakeholder groups and 3) a provisional Action Plan was prepared. This case study illustrates the key moments and events of the process of elaboration of the IWRM. 

GWP Chair Dr. Ursula Schaefer-Preuss gave the introductory keynote to the Second Mekong River Commission Summit and International Conference in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on 2 April. She presented some key elements related to the Post-2015 Development Agenda, stressing the need for a dedicated water goal in an ever-changing world.

In its efforts to continue building capacity for improved water management in the region, Global Water Partnership-Caribbean (GWP-C) together with its partner, the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI) hosted a workshop entitled ‘Water Use Efficiency in the Agriculture Sector’ on November 1^st - 3^rd, 2011 at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Centre in St. Kitts.

The Global Water Partnership-Caribbean (GWP-C) together with the United Nations Environment Programme, Caribbean Regional Coordinating Unit (UNEP-CAR/RCU) and the Global Environment Facility’s Caribbean Regional Fund for Wastewater Management (GEF CReW) were able to successfully bring together over thirty (30) regional organisations working in the areas of water and wastewater in the Caribbean on April 28^th and 29^th, 2014 in Barbados.

Burundi is a landlocked state, bordered by Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Tanzania. The climate is equatorial which, due to considerable altitude variation, results in a great variety of mean temperature across the country. There are two wet seasons (February to May and September to November), and two dry seasons (June to August and December to January). Burundi has large deposits of e.g. nickel, uranium, rare earth oxides, peat, cobalt, copper and platinum.

Management instruments are specific methods that enable decision makers to make rational and informed choices when it comes to water management and to tailor their actions to specific situations. Good water governance, according to IWRM principles brings together perspectives and knowledge from different domains. Consequently, the instruments presented here are based on a variety of disciplines such as hydrology, hydraulics, environmental sciences, system engineering, legal sciences, sociology, and economics.

It is often said that the current water crisis is mainly a crisis of governance, much more than a crisis of water shortage or water pollution per se. In the context of IWRM, governance is defined as the range of political, social, economic and administrative institutions that are in place (or need to be in place) to develop and manage water resources in sustainable manners. This section identifies four institutional roles that must be fulfilled for water governance systems to achieve sound IWRM practices: B1 – Regulation and Enforcement; B2 – Water Supply and Sanitation Services; B3 – Coordination and Facilitation; and B4 – Capacity Building.