The Water Tracker: Find the Water to Build Resilience!
AGWA is launching a new tool we call the Water Tracker for National Climate Planning, with support from FCDO, the dozens of countries in the Adaptation Action Coalition, and our partners at Sanitation and Water for All (SWA), the Global Water Partnership (GWP), and UNICEF.
Why do we need to track water in our NDCs, NAPs, and other climate planning processes?
In AGWA, we have learned that water resilience provides an essential, informative compass for most adaptation and resilience strategies, policies, and actions, with some critical climate mitigation co-benefits. Water is widely recognized as both a major component of many climate-related disasters — the “teeth” of climate change. Building water resilience is an approach to water management, planning, and policy that can integrate many sectors, reduce sectoral, political, and institutional conflict, and clarify sequencing, priorities, and contingencies.
Water is mentioned by most but not all NDCs and NAPs, typically as a source of climate risk (e.g., floods, droughts) or as a “sector” requiring specific interventions, especially for new storage and other types of infrastructure investment. Unfortunately, water is very rarely described as a resource that connects sectors, and very few NDCs or NAPs acknowledge that climate change itself may alter water use and management patterns, so that shifts in irrigation commitments may grow to be incoherent with both water-intensive clean energy investments and expanding water supply and hygiene needs for rural communities and the urban poor. Both climate mitigation and adaptation responses often represent an intensified approach to water use, requiring more explicit, transparent, and flexible tradeoffs in decision making.
Water resilience represents a level of awareness that is higher than has been described by more than a handful of extant NDCs.
Over the coming months, with your participation, we will develop, test, and apply the Water Tracker to a series of countries and cases. Please reach out! We need your ideas, insights, and advice.