Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene December 2018 Vol.13 No.6 | Page 16

Climate Change
Time to adapt to changing climate: what
does it mean for water?
Submitted By Greg Bowlder
resources and water services? How can we help bring new
tools and practices to contribute to the broader adaptation
agenda?
A
s COP24 in Poland reaches its mid-point, it is
becoming distressingly obvious that reaching the
Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming
to well below 2 degrees Centigrade will be extremely
challenging. Recognizing that millions of people across
the world are already facing the severe consequences of
more extreme weather events, the World Bank Group’s
newly announced plan on climate financing for 2021-2025
includes a significant boost for adaptation.
Climate change impacts water resources first and
foremost. Its impacts are channeled through the
hydrological cycle and propelled by water through the
economy, society, and the environment. Water connects
sectors – from energy and forests to agriculture and
urban development and has a critical role in both climate
mitigation and adaptation.
Most importantly, we should expand our view beyond
traditional “integrated water resources management”
and consider the whole hydrological cycle: weather,
watersheds, and water. This means reaching out and
contributing to larger agendas including disaster risk
management, sustainable landscapes, resilient cities, and
climate smart agriculture. Water is the great connector
across these agendas—in many ways water is to adaptation
what energy is to mitigation. We need to formulate water
smart policies, build strong water resource management
agencies, develop river basin plans, and invest in resilient
water infrastructure. Water management is fundamental to
climate adaptation by ensuring efficient and flexible water
allocations, closing the water supply-demand gap, and
ensuring environmental sustainability.
Weather, flood, and droughts drive water resources
management and disaster risk management. We need to
work across sectors to ensure our clients receive the best
possible climate services. Healthy watersheds link weather
and water resources and are at the heart of sustainable
landscapes. For cities to be resilient, they also need to be
water sensitive.
As the world becomes hotter, wetter, and drier due to
climate change, water security has become a global priority.
As many as 4 billion people already experience water stress
at some point in the year. In 2017, natural disasters—
most of them weather related, affected almost 100 million
people and cost an estimated $335 billion dollars. Water
scarcity, exacerbated by climate change, could cost some
regions up to 6% of their GDP, spur migration, and spark
conflict.
The front line of climate adaption faces the new reality
of dealing with too much or too little water, requiring
new and more effective ways of managing this precious
resource. Poor or absent water management policies will
exacerbate the effects of climate change on water, while
sound water management can neutralize many of the
water-related impacts of climate change.
What does this mean for our work related to both water
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Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • December 2018
We should put more emphasis on water in agriculture,
both for food security and resource management reasons.
Agriculture accounts for 80-90% of our consumptive
water use, and much of it is used inefficiently. In the same
way irrigation was key to the Green Revolution in the mid/