– Report from GWP’s Side Event at Astana 2011
At the Seventh “Environment for Europe” Ministerial Conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, GWP convened a side event titled, “Economic Growth and Water: An Integrated Approach Helps” on September 23, 2011. GWP Chair Dr Letitia A Obeng emphasized that “When we speak about the economy and economic growth we speak about water resources.”
– GWP at UN Round-table on Water Security
GWP participated in the UN High Level Round-table Discussion on Water, Peace and Security on Tuesday, 25 September 2012, at the UN Headquarters in New York. The round-table was a side event during the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly, and was hosted by the European Union, the United States, and UN-Water.
Conflicts over water use in the Chancay-Lambayeque Basin in northern Peru have increased sharply.
The Botswana Country Water Partnership (BCWP) was launched in October 2003 as a chapter of GWP-SA. The Partnership was established with a mission to promote collaboration and sustainable utilization and management of water resources in Botswana through exchange of knowledge, experience and the practice of IWRM.
The assessment of transboundary water cooperation in Central and Western Europe was the topic of a subregional workshop in Budapest on February 8-10, 2011, organized by the Ministry of Rural Development of Hungary, and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) in cooperation with the International Water Assessment Centre (IWAC).
Despite high water availability in Jamaica, uneven distribution in both time and space creates local scarcity. Hence, it is problematic to distribute water adequately to all sectors, and to develop abstraction points for water treatment. To address the issues, action was taken and a Water Sector Reform was proposed, including a Water Sector Strategy and Action Plan. From this experience, the lesson learned is the importance of coordinating activities and harmonising policies, legislation and institutions.
The water resources of The Bahamas are threatened by over-abstraction, misuse and pollution. In the past, water management in the Bahamas has been conducted through a single-sector approach. To address its issues, actions have been taken to move towards IWRM and a multi-sector approach. In particular, attention has been focused on improving stakeholder participation and advancing political commitment. Presently only being partially successful, IWRM implementation in Bahamas highlights that it is a long term process.
Steadily shrinking for decades due to unsustainable irrigation policies, the Aral Sea is under increasing pressure, making both allocation and availability major challenges. Action has been taken and the Basin Economic Allocation Model has been developed as a long-term decision support system to facilitate putting “value on water use”. This demonstrates that economic models can be applied to assess economic value maximization of different water uses.
To supply water to a growing population, an aqueduct was built in the watershed of El Limón River in Tovar municipality. However, this aqueduct does not provide sufficient supply, creating conflicts among the communities. To solve these, agreements on the use and conservation of water resources have been made among the communities, involving both rural villages and urban areas. This illustrates the benefits of a participatory approach.
16,000 children from 14 Danube countries expressed how they felt about their river in this basin-wide contest.