“Water security is at the heart of our global development challenge”, said GWP’s new Patron, Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as she spoke at Africa Water Week 2014 (AWW5) in Dakar, Senegal.
Despite an almost abundance of water, most water users in the South-western region of Burkina Faso regularly face water shortages due to an intensification of irrigated agriculture. Action was consequently taken to set up the Local Water Committee. The lesson learnt is that in the realm of the water sector, it is crucial for the state, local authorities, civil society and the private sector to collaborate to find new potential solutions.
Caribbean countries face a number of challenges in maintaining adequate supplies of water for their populations. Challenges range from low annual rainfall levels to inadequate storage, polluted water sources, and poor management of existing water resources.
The Global Water Partnership (GWP) has published its Annual Report for 2014, highlighting the Network’s achievements across all its thirteen (13) Regional Water Partnerships (RWPs) which includes the Global Water Partnership-Caribbean (GWP-C).
The “Water Integrity Capacity Building Programme for the MENA Region” was officially labelled under the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) framework, during the Senior Officials of the Member Countries’ Meeting on December 4, 2014 at the headquarters of the UfM Secretariat, in Barcelona.
Both water and energy are essential to every aspect of life; social equity, human health, ecosystem integrity and economic sustainability. The longstanding division between energy and water considerations is particularly evident in the case of energy and water management. These resources are fundamentally intertwined; energy is used to secure, deliver, treat and distribute water, while water is used to develop, process and deliver energy.
The Second workshop of the Integrated Drought Management Programme in Central and Eastern Europe was held on 8-9 April in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
The Volta Basin Authority (VBA) held from August 3 to 5, 2015, in Abidjan, Republic of Côte d'Ivoire the Regional Stakeholder Forum on Governance in the Volta Basin under the theme "Water, source of conflict or cooperation".
Organized by the VBA in collaboration with IUCN, the meeting gathered the focal points of the VBA, civil society, the six riparian countries (Benin, Burkina, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Mali, and Togo) and resource persons from IUCN, WRCC / ECOWAS, CILSS and GWP / WA.
Clearing for logging, combined with expanding agriculture and palm oil plantations has led to increased flooding, and pollution of the Kinabatangan River due to pesticides and fertilizers. Working in partnership, the Sabah Wildlife Department and the WWF took action and have established the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary. The key lesson of this case is the value of starting with small-scale feasible projects before scaling up.