Accelerating change to solve the water and sanitation crisis
This year’s theme for World Water Day 2023 is “accelerating change to solve the water and sanitation crisis.” At IWMI, we are proud to be an organization that researches innovative solutions and scales them to improve water security in more than thirty countries across the Global South. Through our partnerships and innovations, IWMI researchers are providing solutions that transform not only water security, but also consider how water intersects with climate resilience, food security, and sustainable ecosystem management, all while promoting gender equity, youth inclusion and advocating for the populations most vulnerable to these crises.
Accelerating change to solve water crises means recognizing that every drop of water counts—and so does the work of our young researchers who are tackling water and sanitation challenges. That’s why this #WorldWaterDay we are highlighting the contributions of our research interns and consultants to projects ranging from food rescue in Sri Lanka to analyzing gaps in urban water policies in Pakistan.
We encourage you to follow IWMI’s social media pages to watch short videos on projects underway in Africa, the Middle East, and Southern and Southeast Asia. Explore our UN Water Conference landing page to read about IWMI’s participation at the conference in New York and how the Transformative Futures for Water Security initiative created eight action-oriented missions that IWMI will advocate for at the conference to influence the UN Global Water Agenda and beyond.
This World Water Day, join us in accelerating change for water security around the world.
UN 2023 Water Conference
Latest updates about IWMI's participation at the UN 2023 Water Conference
Researchers contributed to global policy discussions during the Rome Water Dialogue and the Committee on World Food Security, both hosted by FAO in October.
On Wednesday morning in Manhattan, the United Nations Water Conference began in dramatic fashion when Mina Guli, a 52-year-old Australian foundation CEO and water activist, broke a blue ribbon stretched across the U.N. Plaza, completing her 200th marathon in a year.
Early warning systems (EWS) facilitate societies’ preparedness and effective response capabilities to climate risks. Climate risks embody hazards, exposure, and vulnerability associated with a particular geographical area. Building an effective EWS requires consideration of the factors above to help people with coping mechanisms. The objective of this paper is to propose an approach that can enhance EWSs and ensure an effective climate risk resilience development. The paper focuses on the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region and highlights the issues with EWS, identifying weaknesses and characteristics of EWS to help in climate risk adaptation strategies. The SADC region was chosen as the context because it is a climate variability and change hotspot with many vulnerable populations residing in rural communities. Trending themes on building climate risk resilience were uncovered through scientific mapping and network analysis of published articles from 2008 to 2022. This paper contributes to on-going research on building climate risks resilience through early warning systems to identify hidden trends and emerging technologies from articles in order to enhance the operationalization and design of EWS. This review provides insight into technological interventions for assessing climate risks to build preparedness and resilience. From the review analysis, it is determined that there exists a plethora of evidence to support the argument that involving communities in the co-designing of EWS would improve risk knowledge, anticipation, and preparedness. Additionally, Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies provide effective tools to address existing EWS’ weaknesses, such as lack of real-time data collection and automation. However, 4IR technology is still at a nascent stage in EWS applications in Africa. Furthermore, policy across societies, institutions, and technology industries ought to be coordinated and integrated to develop a strategy toward implementing climate resilient-based EWS to facilitate the operations of disaster risk managers. The Social, Institutional, and Technology model can potentially increase communities’ resilience; therefore, it is recommended to develop EWS.
Bibliometric analysis / SADC countries / Weather hazards / Extreme weather events / Community involvement / Climate change adaptation / Early warning systems / Disaster risk reduction / Climate resilience Record No:H052487
Hydro-climatic extremes, such as floods and droughts, are influenced by climate change and climate variability, significantly affecting natural ecosystems, human lives, and livelihood. It is crucial to advance the understanding of long-term trends of hydro-climatic extremes for effective water resource planning and management. We analyzed 25 climatic extremes-related indices and 33 hydrologic extremes-related indices in a medium-range river basin in western Nepal, the Babai River Basin. We used RClimDex and Indicators for Hydrologic Alterations to analyze extreme climatic and hydrologic parameters. We computed monotonic trends to evaluate temporal changes in extreme events. The results show a positive trend of total precipitation at Kusum (+ 2.2 mm/year) and Bargadaha (+ 17.7 mm/year) stations and a negative trend at Gulariya (- 5.7 mm/year), Nayabasti (- 7.0 mm/year), Luwamjula (- 5.9 mm/year), and Ghorai (- 18.5 mm/year) stations. Similarly, we observe that almost all temperature extreme indices have a rising trend except the percentage of the days when the maximum temperature is less than the 10th percentile index at Rani Jaruwa station, located at a low elevation. Notably, the cold day temperature index falls at 0.13 days per year. Overall, the hydrologic alteration value shows moderate variability and reduction in the median flow for the second half. The findings of this study indicate that the study area is subjected to a reduced flow regime with a medium degree of variability.
Spatial distribution / Trends / Discharge / Temperature / Precipitation / Parameters / Climate change / River basins / Indicators / Hydrological factors / Extreme weather events Record No:H052322
Antibiotics have revolutionised medicine in the last century and enabled the prevention of bacterial infections that were previously deemed untreatable. However, in parallel, bacteria have increasingly developed resistance to antibiotics through various mechanisms. When resistant bacteria find their way into terrestrial and aquatic environments, animal and human exposures increase, e.g., via polluted soil, food, and water, and health risks multiply. Understanding the fate and transport of antibiotic resistant bacteria (ARB) and the transfer mechanisms of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in aquatic environments is critical for evaluating and mitigating the risks of resistant-induced infections. The conceptual understanding of sources and pathways of antibiotics, ARB, and ARGs from society to the water environments is essential for setting the scene and developing an appropriate framework for modelling. Various factors and processes associated with hydrology, ecology, and climate change can significantly affect the fate and transport of ARB and ARGs in natural environments. This article reviews current knowledge, research gaps, and priorities for developing water quality models to assess the fate and transport of ARB and ARGs. The paper also provides inputs on future research needs, especially the need for new predictive models to guide risk assessment on AR transmission and spread in aquatic environments.
Climate change / Risk assessment / Bacteria / Microbial communities / Wastewater treatment plants / Groundwater / Sediment / Health hazards / Environmental factors / Modelling / Water quality / Gene transfer / Aquatic environment / Antibiotic resistance Record No:H052253
Quantifying water-saving potential (WSP) is crucial for sustainable water resource management in canal command areas and river basins. Previous studies have partially or fully ignored the importance of groundwater in WSP assessments, particularly in irrigated areas. This study is aimed at quantifying WSP in the Lower Chenab Canal (LCC) command area of the Indus River Basin, Pakistan, under various scenarios of future climate change and groundwater recharge. These quantifications are conducted using an empirical model based on the Budyko theory. The model was forced using observed, remote sensing, and CMIP6 future climate data for two Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP245 and SSP585) and their ensembles (cold-dry, cold-wet, warm-dry, and warm-wet) for possible futures. The results showed that the average WSP in the LCC command area was 466 48 mm/year during the historical period (2001–2020). The WSP is projected to decrease by – 68 3% under the warm-dry ensemble scenario (SSP245 and SSP585) and – 48 13% under the ensembled cold-wet scenario by 2100. The results also demonstrated that WSP could be increased by up to 70 9% by artificially recharging 20% of the abstracted groundwater per year in the LCC command area by the late twenty-first century. Our findings highlight the importance of adopting artificial groundwater recharge to enhance the WSP and sustainably manage water resources in the LCC command area. Policymakers should consider these findings when deciding on water resource management in the Indus River Basin.
Models / Projections / Water availability / Artificial recharge / Energy balance / Water management / Water resources / Irrigation efficiency / Irrigation systems / River basins / Groundwater recharge / Climate change / Water conservation Record No:H052239
Food security / Resilience / Agrobiodiversity / Climate change / Climate-smart agriculture / Underutilized species / Crop modelling Record No:H052691
Reyes-Garca, V.; Garca-Del-Amo, D.; Porcuna-Ferrer, A.; Schlingmann, A.; Abazeri, M.; Attoh, Emmanuel M. N. A. N.; vila, J. V. d. C.; Ayanlade, A.; Babai, D.; Benyei, P.; Calvet-Mir, L.; Carmona, R.; Caviedes, J.; Chah, J.; Chakauya, R.; Cun-Sanchez, A.; Fernndez-Llamazares, .; Galappaththi, E. K.; Gerkey, D.; Graham, S.; Guillerminet, T.; Huanca, T.; Ibarra, J. T.; Junqueira, A. B.; Li, X.; Lpez-Maldonado, Y.; Mattalia, G.; Samakov, A.; Schunko, C.; Seidler, R.; Sharakhmatova, V.; Singh, P.; Tofghi-Niaki, A.; Torrents-Tic, M.; LICCI Consortium. 2024. Local studies provide a global perspective of the impacts of climate change on indigenous peoples and local communities.Sustainable Earth Reviews, 7:1 . [DOI] More... | Fulltext (1.26 MB)
Indigenous Peoples and local communities with nature-dependent livelihoods are disproportionately affected by climate change impacts, but their experience, knowledge and needs receive inadequate attention in climate research and policy. Here, we discuss three key findings of a collaborative research consortium arising from the Local Indicators of Climate Change Impacts project. First, reports of environmental change by Indigenous Peoples and local communities provide holistic, relational, placed-based, culturally-grounded and multi-causal understandings of change, largely focused on processes and elements that are relevant to local livelihoods and cultures. These reports demonstrate that the impacts of climate change intersect with and exacerbate historical effects of socioeconomic and political marginalization. Second, drawing on rich bodies of inter-generational knowledge, Indigenous Peoples and local communities have developed context-specific responses to environmental change grounded in local resources and strategies that often absorb the impacts of multiple drivers of change. Indigenous Peoples and local communities adjust in diverse ways to impacts on their livelihoods, but the adoption of responses often comes at a significant cost due to economic, political, and socio-cultural barriers operating at societal, community, household, and individual levels. Finally, divergent understandings of change challenge generalizations in research examining the human dimensions of climate change. Evidence from Indigenous and local knowledge systems is context-dependent and not always aligned with scientific evidence. Exploring divergent understandings of the concept of change derived from different knowledge systems can yield new insights which may help prioritize research and policy actions to address local needs and priorities.
Sociocultural environment / Local knowledge / Livelihoods / Local communities / Indigenous peoples / Climate change impacts Record No:H052569
Reyes-Garca, V.; Garca-del-Amo, D.; lvarez-Fernndez, S.; Benyei, P.; Calvet-Mir, L.; Junqueira, A. B.; Labeyrie, V.; LI, X.; Miarro, S.; Porcher, V.; Porcuna-Ferrer, A.; Schlingmann, A.; Schunko, C.; Soleymani, R.; Tofighi-Niaki, A.; Abazeri, M.; Attoh, Emmanuel M. N. A. N.; Ayanlade, A.; vila, J. V. D. C.; Babai, D.; Bulamah, R. C.; Campos-Silva, J.; Carmona, R.; Caviedes, J.; Chakauya, R.; Chambon, M.; Chen, Z.; Chengula, F.; Conde, E.; Cun-Sanchez, A.; Demichelis, C.; Dudina, E.; Fernndez-Llamazares, .; Galappaththi, E. K.; Geffner-Fuenmayor, C.; Gerkey, D.; Glauser, M.; Hirsch, E.; Huanca, T.; Ibarra, J. T.; Izquierdo, A. E.; Junsberg, L.; Lanker, M.; Lpez-Maldonado, Y.; Mariel, J.; Mattalia, G.; Miara, M. D.; Torrents-Tic, M.; Salimi, M.; Samakov, A.; Seidler, R.; Sharakhmatova, V.; Shrestha, U. B.; Sharma, A.; Singh, P.; Ulambayar, T.; Wu, R.; Zakari, I. S. 2024. Indigenous peoples and local communities report ongoing and widespread climate change impacts on local social-ecological systems.Communications Earth and Environment, 5:29. [DOI] More... | Fulltext (1.83 MB)
The effects of climate change depend on specific local circumstances, posing a challenge for worldwide research to comprehensively encompass the diverse impacts on various local social-ecological systems. Here we use a place-specific but cross-culturally comparable protocol to document climate change indicators and impacts as locally experienced and analyze their distribution. We collected first-hand data in 48 sites inhabited by Indigenous Peoples and local communities and covering all climate zones and nature-dependent livelihoods. We documented 1,661 site-agreed reports of change corresponding to 369 indicators. Reports of change vary according to climate zone and livelihood activity. We provide compelling evidence that climate change impacts on Indigenous Peoples and local communities are ongoing, tangible, widespread, and affect multiple elements of their social-ecological systems. Beyond potentially informing contextualized adaptation plans, our results show that local reports could help identify economic and non-economic loss and damage related to climate change impacts suffered by Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Climatic zones / Livelihoods / Indicators / Climate change / Local communities / Indigenous peoples Record No:H052568