The GWP Water, Climate and Development Programme (WACDEP) guided and inspired a National Dialogue between the Burundi Ministry of Water, Environment, Land Management and Urbanism (MEATU) and citizens over the sustainable management of the Cohoha Water Catchment in December 2013.
Today water stress is a major concern in many urban areas. The core aspect of urbanisation is the rapid urban population growth together with inadequate planning, pollution, poverty, competing demands on the resource, all contribute to water stress: and consequently the urban water consumption is likely to double by 2025. Climate change is expected to cause significant changes as well in precipitation patterns which will affect the availability of water and induce water related disasters.
An e-module on IWRM was launched in 2012 after a lengthy a collaboration between several German institutions that had identified a gap in the field of integrated water resources management education. The development of the module continues, with GWP as a potential “catalyst” to generate further interest in the module.
The Lake Atitlán basin experiences serious problems of water pollution, soil erosion and forest and biodiversity losses. Action was taken to establish the Authority for the Sustainable Management of the Atitlán Basin. However, barriers such as lack of public participation, institutional coordination and investment funds have only ensured limited success. The key lesson learnt is that the main barriers to an integrated management of water resources in the basin are strongly interlinked.
The Ghana Country Water Partnership (CWP-Ghana) has held the validation meeting for the report on the study entitled “Impacts and Vulnerability assessment of Climate Change in the Upper East Region of Ghana and pathways to Creating Green Solutions and Integrating Climate-Smart Interventions into development Planning”. The program took place at the SSNIT conference room at Bolgatanga on 17th July, 2014 and was chaired by Mr Aduna from the White Volta Basin Office (WVB).
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.
The Global Water Partnership Southern Africa, on behalf of the Strengthening Institutions for Transboundary Waters Resources Management in Africa (SITWA) project held a regional consultation for about 20 participants to ensure regional stakeholder input into the draft 10-year strategy and a detailed 5-year action plan of the African Network of Basin Organizations (ANBO) was held on 30th and 31st July, 2014 at the Gaborone Sun hotel in Gaborone, Botswana.
Twenty (20) practitioners from the Agriculture Sector in Barbados, recently had the opportunity to be trained in the area of Water Use Efficiency (WUE) at a workshop put on by the Global Water Partnership-Caribbean (GWP-C) and its partner, the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI).
On March 4, 2013, Mr. Zheng Rugang, the Coordinator of GWP China was invited to discuss about the participation of GWP China in the UK-China Cooperation Project “Working with China to Support Sustainable Water Resources Management in Developing Countries” with Ms. Wu Lin, the Project Manager of UK DFID China.