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GWP Executive Secretary Dr. Ania Grobicki participated in the second Global Soil Week at the end of October. She reaffirmed GWP’s support to the Global Soil Partnership and discussed the role of soils in the Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus.

Oil-shale mining and oil-shale based electricity production has caused serious damage to ground and surface water in the Viru-Peipsi catchment area in Estonia. Action was taken to enhance the protection of the water resources through a project that set out a management plan. The project included data collection, monitoring and capacity building. Due to the success of this project, it can be used as an example for future developments. 

To improve monitoring and management of river basins in Slovakia, a project was initiated among secondary school students with the objective to attract the attention of young generation to the protection of the river basin and to mobilise the interest of local communities in public campaigns to improve the quality of river basin. The key lesson drawn from this case study is that linking education activities and local communities campaigns are effective tool for public participation.

The Lempa River is shared by Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, making its management a good example of transboundary cooperation. To reach consensus, action was taken to develop a treaty as part of a regional process.  However, since the treaty was not accompanied by strategies designed by local actors, it is somewhat weak. Nonetheless, this case illustrates that political willingness is crucial for advancing towards IWRM in transboundary watersheds. 

We would like to collect feedback from those of you who use GWP’s IWRM ToolBox to learn what needs to be improved and how.

The Global Water Partnership Eastern Africa Secretariat held a consultative meeting with local government officials to garner consensus and local government’s feedback on the project’s objectives, intended outcomes, foreseeable challenges and steps to garner citizen participation and support for the WACDEP Trans-boundary project.

According to the Dublin Water Principles, (1) water resources are to be firmly brought under the State’s function of clarifying and maintaining a system of property rights, and (2) through the principle of participatory management, the State asserts the relevance of meaningful decentralization at the lowest appropriate level. In other words, regulatory and compliance powers have, on the one hand, the responsibility to establish policies and regulations in relation to physical water resources, but on the other hand, also need to articulate how the people and institutions are in fact managing these natural resources.

GWP Southern Africa has participated in national and international dialogues focusing on water in the post 2015 development agenda. The dialogues form part of the UN national dialogue (post Rio +20) process which will feed into the development of the UN post 2015 Sustainable Development Goal(s).

The Pungwe River basin offers significant opportunity for economic growth for Mozambique. The rate of economic success depends to a great extent on the implementation of IWRM. Action was taken to assess the progress of IWRM using a set of indicators addressing relevant areas. It became evident that implementing IWRM takes time and in order to reach success, implementation of IWRM has to follow the pace that can be adopted by all involved parties.