UNU-IWEH Rolls out Monitoring System on Water-related SDGs
Water Supply including Sao Paulo’ s drought and Kenya’ s water supply challenges.
The conclusion? That each challenge is different, but having a structured process can help policymakers identify and weigh trade-offs between different water uses and different water policy objectives.
This discussion continued at the workshop’ s flagship event held at Oxford’ s historic Martin School attended by over 150 participants. Richard Damania gave a presentation laying out the approach and preliminary results, followed by two panel discussions with leading water experts. Much of the discussion focused on two key issues, climate change and working in countries affected by fragility, conflict, and violence. Panelists and participants produced a number of suggestions for how the World Bank report could better influence the climate change discussion, including an invitation to engage with a major new research project being conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and recommendations on working with researchers to improve data availability and decision-making support, particularly in countries with low institutional capacity.
Despite plenty of debate and discussion during the two-day event, one common theme emerged among the researchers, practitioners, and experts assembled in Oxford: strengthened partnerships are essential to tackling the world’ s water challenges. The World Bank team looks forward to sharing the results of the Unchartered Water report— and to hearing what you think!
Source: Inter Press Services
UNU-IWEH Rolls out Monitoring System on Water-related SDGs
3 February 2017: The UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health( UNU-IWEH) has launched a“ policy support system”( PSS) for tracking progress and action towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6( SDG 6) on clean water and sanitation. UNU is inviting policy makers, international organizations and water management professionals to assist in trialing and reviewing the monitoring system.
The Sustainable Development Goal Policy Support System( SDG-PSS) brings together tools from various international agencies to map progress against the SDG 6 targets and indicators in the areas of: finance; capacity; policy and institutional strength; gender mainstreaming; disaster risk reduction( DRR) and resilience mainstreaming; and transparency. The PSS not only enables the mapping of progress, but also helps governments report on their SDG implementation efforts. It also seeks to support cross-sector, evidencebased policy and planning, and to accelerate progress on all water-related SDGs. The platform links data from more than 20 water-related tools developed by the World Health Organization( WHO), the UN Children’ s Fund( UNICEF), the International Rescue Committee( IRC), and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development( OECD). Data used in the SDG-PSS comes from sources including the UN-Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking Water( GLAAS), and the OECD’ s Toolkit for Integrity.
The SDG-PSS is currently being tested in Costa Rica, Ghana, the Republic of Korea, Pakistan and Tunisia. Partners in this effort include the Korean Environment Corporation( Keco), the Ministry for Environment, the Republic of Korea, and the UN Office for Sustainable Development( UNOSD). UNU-IWEH has posted a series of video tutorials online to help interested stakeholders start using the SDG-PSS. The test version is available as an Excel file in English, Korean, French and Spanish.
In a communication to international organization partners, Vladimir Smakhtin, UNU-IWEH, noted that the current version of the SDG-PSS focuses on SDG 6, but could eventually be adjusted to support mapping of achievements towards other SDGs.
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