June 3 and 4, 2014, in Beijing, the Senior Network Officer Angela Klaeusen who was freshly nominated as the Network Officer of GWP China Region and GWP South Asia Region visited the Secretariat of the GWP China to conduct a two-day working meeting. This is her first time of visiting GWP China Secretariat.
The theme of the GWP Communications training workshop 9-13 December 2013 was "Developing a Communications Strategy".
On April 17, 2013 in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic, a workshop was held to discuss the report on Green Growth in the Aral Sea, prepared by the Global Water Partnership (GWP) of Central Asia and the Caucasus, the Scientific Information Center of the Interstate Coordination Water Commission (SIC ICWC) of Central Asia with the support from the Global Green Growth Institute (Korea). The workshop was attended by officials from national water agencies and executive bodies of ICWC.
The Bodrog River Basin is exposed to severe flooding caused by jumbled urbanisation and low connectivity between land (agriculture and forestry), urban and water planning. Management is made more complex by the transboundary nature of the basin. A project was, however initiated to strengthen cooperative management and to mitigate consequences of floods through achieving consistent and holistic management of flood risk in three basin countries. This case illustrates the importance of transboundary flood management.
Egypt’s water resources are severely constrained. This calls for increasing the water use efficiency by improving irrigation management practice, as the agriculture sector is the main user of water resources. To address the issue, an Irrigation Improvement Programme was initiated, including a combination of technical changes and infrastructure investment. The case clearly demonstrates the importance of building appropriate institutional structures in parallel to the introduction of technical changes.
In Turkey, operations and maintenance for irrigation systems was highly centralised, but this imposed an increasing institutional and financial burden on the government. Action has consequently been taken to transfer irrigation management to Water User Associations. The key insight from this case is that legal reforms should accompany institutional changes to enable full benefits to be gained.
The Maltese islands experience acute water shortage as an area. To address this, leakage control has been developed to become a strategically important component for water resource management, and has been used to reach an optimum economic balance between water supply and water demand. The key lesson is that leakage management is an effective supply side action to increase efficiency in water use leading, and can be used as a strategic tool.