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.
Due to increased agricultural irrigation and large scale dam projects, and inappropriate land and water management practices, the water inflow to the Komadugu Yobe Basin has dramatically been reduced. Action has been taken to establish a legal and policy enabling environment, as well as to increase knowledge among the local communities to establish more sustainable behaviour. The main lesson learnt was that although a multi-stakeholder participatory approach is slow, it helped to mobilise partnership.
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 28th and 29th, 2014 in Barbados.
On 29 October 2014 the Government of the Republic of Uzbekistan organized an international conference “Development of Cooperation in the Aral Sea Basin to Mitigate Consequences of the Environmental Catastrophe” in Urgench, Uzbekistan.
A multi-stakeholders' consultation on “Issues of governance in the water sector” was organized recently by the India Water Partnership (Global Water Partnership - India) in association with Transparency International India (TII) on June 18 at New Delhi.
The GWP Technical Committee Background paper No. 16: Integrated Urban Water Management by Dr. Akica Bahri, Technical Committee member, discusses different aspects of the urban water cycle and highlights the challenges of how to integrate urban, land-use planning and water planning towards economic development.
The Coordination and Change project of the Limpopo Basin Development Challenge (LBDC), under the leadership of FANRPAN, GWP SA and WaterNet, is organizing a one and a half day workshop on 21-22 October 2013 in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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).
A case study on GWP ToolBox presents experiences from construction of reed bed waste water treatment plant in Vidrare village, central Bulgaria.