Assessing Climate Risks for Semi-Arid Regions

The seventh webinar of the series “Climate-resilient Water Management Approaches: Adaptation in an Age of Uncertainty”, hosted by UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme (IHP), together with the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA) and the International Center for Integrated Water Resources Management (ICIWaRM), will highlight the challenges that climate change pose for semi-arid regions. Speakers will bring us examples from India and Iran, focusing on the benefits of participatory system modeling and on the sustainability at the basin level, respectively.

In the first presentation, Shuchi Vora will present her work using participatory strategies to enable systemic changes in water resources management. Through Systems Thinking Workshops, Shuchi and colleagues have helped facilitate collective visioning for resilient groundwater futures at the regional level in India. Focusing on interlinkages and cross-disciplinary thinking, the work has led to the co-production of knowledge and co-owning of solutions for managing water risk in drought-hit areas of India.

In the second presentation, Mojtaba Shafiei will highlight an indicator-based sustainability assessment framework for water management that has been developed and used in the semi-arid Mashhad Basin in Iran. The decision support tool is designed to support policy decision making for sustainable development, while representing diverse stakeholder needs related to water management practices. The framework focuses on technical, environmental, social, and economic components within a basin lens. The research and application of the framework are meant to serve as a bridge between researchers and decision makers.