Fifty water professionals attended a Capacity Building Workshop on Integrated Water Resources Management on November 25-28, 2008 in Skhoder Lake, Albania. The focus was on the conditions in the transboundary Drin River Basin.
With support from GWP and UNDP the Kazakhstan government has drafted an IWRM plan and established river basin councils, realizing that management problems could be helped off by IWRM.
The 4th Euro-Mediterranean Ministerial Conference on Water failed to adopt a comprehensive and urgently needed Strategy for Water in the Mediterranean because of a failure to compromise on the wording of two key political issues: the reference or not to ‘occupied territories’ and the reference or not to the UN Convention on the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses.
GWP Chile was accredited as a Country Water Partnership on April 9. In response to a congratulatory letter from GWP Executive Secretary Dr Ania Grobicki, GWP Chile Chair Ms María Angelica Alegria explained some of the water-related challenges facing her nation in light of its recent earthquake.
A regional process to save the Aral Sea has resulted in an “Action Plan for the realization of the Decisions of the Presidents” of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
In December, 120 people, including members of parliamentary committees, director generals, representatives of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), other multilateral organisations, and international and local NGOs validated the Burundi IWRM Plan and demanded immediate implementation.
In an effort to boost disaster control and prevention in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake on May 12, 2008, GWP China proposed and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) funded the project, “Evaluation of Post-quake Rural Water Supply Facilities and Capacity Building.”
Caribbean Ministers of Water will meet to discuss water security at the Global Water Partnership-Caribbean’s (GWP-C) and the Caribbean Water and Wastewater Association’s (CWWA), 6th High Level Session (HLS) in Grenada on October 3rd and 4th, 2010.
Cancun, Mexico. 1st December, 2010.
Real development: national planning that integrates water resources management and adaptation
On the afternoon of December 1st, two representatives from GWP participated in two different panels of the Dialogs for Water and Climate Change. The first was “Bridging IWRM and National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs)” and the second was a Stakeholder’s Panel: “Urgencies to Adapt—Experiences and Constraints.”
(Photo: GWP Chair Dr Letitia A Obeng)
Benin in West Africa belongs to the group of Least Developed Countries (LDC) with a low per capita GDP. Its economy is predominantly dependant on subsistence farming (extensive cotton production) and regional trade. The country is drained by a dense hydrographical network made up of seasonal flow rivers and less than 3% of its renewable water resources are currently used.