Water and climate change are intricately linked. Global warming is changing the water cycle, affecting water availability and quality and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. At the same time, sustainable water management and energy-efficient wastewater treatment play an important role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. This state-of-the-art report encapsulates the main impacts of climate change on the water cycle and highly water-dependent sectors.
As part of this year’s online World Water Week at Home, adelphi and IHE Delft convened the workshop "Water diplomacy: a tool for climate action?". The workshop reflected on the role that foreign policy can play in mitigating, solving and potentially preventing conflicts over the management of transboundary water resources, especially in a changing climate.
In 2021, on a date to be determined, the UN Secretary-General will convene a Food Systems Summit with the aim of maximising the co-benefits of a food systems approach across the entire 2030 Agenda and meeting the challenges of climate change.
World Water Week 2020 was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To help bridge the gap between the 2019 and 2021 World Water Weeks, the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) organised 'WWWeek At Home' between 24 and 28 August 2020.
In this SIWI World Water Week workshop organised by adelphi and IHE Delft, experts from the diplomacy, development, security, climate change and water communities discussed the conditions under which specific diplomatic tools can be used by riparian and non-riparian countries to shape regional cooperation to address climate, and other security and development challenges, such as migration.
Conflicts connected to water-security are often related to climate change issues. However, the link between water-scarcity-related risks and security challenges is not as straightforward, direct and immediate as often perceived. The online workshop ‘Mobilising decision-makers on water scarcity-induced conflict risks: The Water, Peace and Security Partnership’, organised by the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO) and adelphi, looked into this complex relationship.
“Food in the time of crises – how to feed the world without eating the planet?” That is the title for this year’s Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) digital conference, which will be broadcasted from Bonn, Germany.
As water is the most disruptive element in the ongoing climate crisis, how land is managed plays a major role in taming this disruption. This publication shows that avoiding, reducing and reversing land degradation can have positive long-term gains in water security.
The 2020 edition of the World Water Development Report (WWDR 2020) entitled ‘Water and Climate Change’ aims at helping the water community to tackle the challenges of climate change and informing the climate change community about the opportunities that improved water management offers in terms of adaptation and mitigation.
The mission of the Munich Security Conference is to “address the world’s most pressing security concerns”. These days, that means climate security: climate change is the ultimate threat multiplier, and anyone discussing food security, political instability, migration, or competition over resources should be aware of the climate change pressures that are so often at the root of security problems.
Australia is currently experiencing one of its worst bushfire seasons, with swathes of the southern and eastern coastal regions having been ablaze for weeks. As the fires have spread, there has been extensive media coverage both nationally and internationally documenting – and debating – their impacts. This Carbon Brief overview summarises how the fires – and the political response to them – have been covered by the media.
IHE Delft is organising the symposium 'From Capacity Development to Implementation Science' on May 26-29, 2020. This is its 6th international symposium on knowledge and capacity development for the water sector, in cooperation with the OECD, Rand Water and other partners. In light of the Coronavirus situation, the event has been moved online.
More than 113 million people across 53 countries experienced acute hunger requiring urgent food, nutrition and livelihoods assistance (IPC/CH Phase 3 or above) in 2018. This report illustrates in stark terms the hunger caused by conflict and insecurity, climate shocks and economic turbulence.
European peatlands could turn from carbon sinks to sources as a quarter have reached levels of dryness unsurpassed in a record stretching back 2,000 years, according to a new study. This trend of “widespread” and “substantial” drying corresponds to recent climate change, both natural and human-caused, but may also be exacerbated by the peatlands being used for agriculture and fuel.
International political boundaries are arbitrary creations. Today’s borders are better described as imaginary lines on maps, rather than hard barriers between states. Often using mountains, rivers, or other geographical landmarks, modern borders are entrenched in historic tradition rather than logic and fact. As a result, today’s international borders are poorly equipped to handle modern challenges, in particular climate change, which has already begun to threaten the most important state resource, fresh water.