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The Integrated Drought Management Project in West Africa (IDMP-WAF) was officially launched at the workshop held on 28 and 29 January 2015 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Forty participants including 4 women, mainly from Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, Sweden, Switzerland and representing regional (CILSS, ECOWAS) and international organizations (ACMAD, WMO and GWPO) took part in this meeting placed under the patronage of the Minister of Agriculture, Water Resources, Sanitation and Food Security of Burkina Faso.

Water resources, in particular conventional rural water supply systems/sources are among the first to be impacted by climate variability. Accessibility to portable water in the sudano-sahelian part of Cameroon is a course for concern given that the population relies mainly on springs, wells and boreholes for the supply of potable water in rural areas.

A three-day National Adaptation Plan (NAP) training workshop was held from the 3rd to 5th of September in Salima, Malawi as an effort to help the Government of Malawi identify the next steps in establishing a NAP process. The workshop was highly interactive drawing upon a broad range of climate sensitive sectors and stakeholders, and was successful in reaching its overall objectives of building an understanding of the NAP process and to draft a roadmap for country level advancement.

The Global Water Partnership (GWP) Sponsoring Partners have announced the appointment of Dr. Oyun Sanjaasuren as the new Chair of GWP, effective July 1, 2016. Dr. Oyun is a Member of Parliament of Mongolia, former Minister of Environment and Green Development, and former Minister of Foreign Affairs. She currently serves as President of the United Nations Environment Assembly of UNEP.

The DIKTAS Project (2010 - 2015) was a collaborative effort to improve knowledge and attract the international community’s attention on the widespread, yet vulnerable and poorly understood karst aquifers in the Dinaric Region; it was also an effort to enhance coordination among countries, agencies and other stakeholders towards an equitable, sustainable, integrated management of the Dinaric Karst Aquifer System’s transboundary water resources and the protection of the unique dependent ecosystems from natural and man-made hazards including climate change.

The Engineering Institute in collaboration with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of The University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine Campus are hosting a Dam Hydraulics Seminar on January 14^th and 15^th, 2015.

The first dam on the Lower Mekong River Mainstream, Xayaburi was notified to the Lower Mekong Countries in 2010. The public consultations took place in each country. The result favoured the construction to be postponed for 10 years to allow further study.

Building water security and climate resilience into development activities is key to achieving long-term sustainability, but requires much higher levels of investment than at present.