Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene December 2018 Vol.13 No.6 | Page 11

NEWS in brief
recognized that MHM is a matter that concerns the dignity
and well-being of all women and girls, particularly school-
aged girls who often miss classes due to inadequate MHM,
and one that underpins rights to sanitation and gender
equality in education.
At the meeting, Member States shared examples of good
practice on how to measure the scope of the problem,
identify the needs of those affected, improve facilities in
schools and strengthen school education on menstruation.
World Bank Group Announces $200 billion over
Five Years for Climate Action
Funding for 2021-2025 includes a significant boost for
adaptation and resilience
The World Bank Group
today announced
a major new set of
climate targets for
2021-2025, doubling
its current 5-year
investments to around
$200 billion in support
for countries to take ambitious climate action. The new
plan significantly boosts support for adaptation and
resilience, recognizing mounting climate change impacts
on lives and livelihoods, especially in the world’s poorest
countries. The plan also represents significantly ramped
up ambition from the World Bank Group, sending an
important signal to the wider global community to do the
same.
“Climate change is an existential threat to the world’s
poorest and most vulnerable. These new targets
demonstrate how seriously we are taking this issue,
investing and mobilizing $200 billion over five years to
combat climate change,” World Bank Group President,
Jim Yong Kim said. “We are pushing ourselves to do
more and to go faster on climate and we call on the global
community to do the same. This is about putting countries
and communities in charge of building a safer, more
climate-resilient future.”
The $200 billion across the Group is made up of
approximately $100 billion in direct finance from the
World Bank (IBRD/IDA), and approximately $100
billion of combined direct finance from the International
Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Multilateral Investment
Guarantee Agency (MIGA) and private capital mobilized
by the World Bank Group.
A key priority is boosting support for climate adaptation,
recognizing that millions of people across the world are
already facing the severe consequences of more extreme
weather events. By ramping up direct adaptation finance
to reach around $50 billion over FY21-25, the World Bank
will, for the first time, give this equal emphasis alongside
investments that reduce emissions.
Global Highlights
Shrinking Groundwater
Groundwater, which has been
used to irrigate crops, satiate
livestock and quench thirst
in general for thousands of
years, continues to be a vital
resource around the world.
But according to research by
Scott Jasechko and Debra
Perrone, assistant professors at UC Santa Barbara, and
their colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan and the
University of Arizona, the world’s supply of fresh water
may be more limited than previously thought.
Their findings, which appear in the journal Environmental
Research Letters, documents the depths at which
groundwater transitions from fresh to saline. The paper is
the first to compare the depth of groundwater wells to the
depth of saline groundwater that exists at the continental
scale.
The more likely minerals in the rock may dissolve into
it. This creates a gradient of salinity, from fresh waters
at the top through brackish and into saline conditions as
you sample farther down. This latest work demonstrates
that drilling increasingly deeper wells risks pumping saline
water in some regions. “In some places, saline groundwater
is shallower than previously thought,” said Jasechko, an
assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of
Environmental Science & Management.
Added Perrone, an assistant professor in the campus’s
environmental studies program, “Combining top-down
and bottom-up studies can give us a window into where
fresh, uncontaminated groundwater exists, and where this
window is getting smaller, either because the ceiling is
coming down or the floor is coming up.”
In addition to salinity, oil and gas activities can restrict the
amount of useable groundwater an aquifer has to offer.
Most conventional oil and gas wells reach far below the
depth to which people drill for water. However, oil and gas
companies often dispose of wastewater in injection wells,
sometimes at depths where fresh groundwater exists.
“In some basins, injections wells are installed shallower
than the transition from fresh to brackish water,” said
Perrone. “Our team’s results suggest that communities are
competing for already limited groundwater resources.”
The next research steps for the team involve exploring
how groundwater salinity and well depths vary in other
areas of the planet where groundwater provides vital
drinking and irrigation waters.
Source: University Of California, Santa Barbara
Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • December 2018
11