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There is growing recognition that water security is critical for sustainable economic development, reducing poverty and adapting to climate change. Yet a key aspect often overlooked in efforts to meet this fundamental need is the role played by ecosystems such as rivers, floodplains and wetlands – or ‘natural infrastructure’.

This is where the WISE-UP project, led by IUCN, comes in. It shows the value of natural infrastructure as a ‘nature-based solution’ for climate change adaptation and sustainable development. As the impacts of rainfall variability, along with population and economic growth, increase competition for water, solutions are needed that maximise the benefits provided by the basin – food, water for irrigation and energy production and so on – whilst maintaining the needs of the basin ecosystem itself.

Focussing on the Volta and Tana River basins of West and East Africa respectively, WISE-UP works with decision makers, encouraging them to consider solutions that are based on both natural and built infrastructure (including dams and irrigation channels).

Dialogue with decision makers to identify and agree trade-offs lead to conversations on more equitable and effective solutions that suit all stakeholders including farmers, local communities and government agencies. However, these conversations need the right tools and knowledge to integrate natural infrastructure into future planning and investment choices, together with the latest climate information to understand the future pressures on river basins.

Key questions arise in these conversations: are the initial project findings relevant to stakeholder needs? Is the research accessible, communicable, and applicable for key decision makers? Is there anything that project partners feel that hasn’t adequately been covered? 

Some of these questions were raised at the recent ‘action learning’ meetings held in Nairobi and Accra, led by our partners, the African Collaborative Center for Earth System Sciences (ACCESS) – University of...Read more

Authors: Laetitia Pettinotti (BC3), Marloes Mul (IWMI), Beatrice Mosello (ODI) and Naomi Oates (ODI)

At the Stockholm World Water Week and in the run up to the United Nations Summit for the adoption of the post-2015 development goals, “water for sustainable development” is top of the international agenda. Ensuring that investments will benefit all, from national to local interests, is the challenge at hand.

Over the last decade, there has been a revived interest in large scale water resource development. The argument is that large dams for irrigation and hydropower generation can contribute to adapting to climate variability and to mitigating risks, while boosting economic growth and reducing poverty.

However the potential for ecosystem services to contribute to water management, thus for nature to perform as natural infrastructure has frequently been neglected. The key question is: how can portfolios of built and natural infrastructures support pro-poor and climate resilient development? Drawing on research from the WISE-UP to Climate project, we pose this question based on two proposed developments in the Tana and Volta River Basins.

Rural-urban water transfers in the upper Tana, Kenya

The Tana River Basin provides over 70% of Nairobi’s water supply and produces a significant proportion of the country’s hydroelectric power. Many rural households intimately depend on the river’s ecosystem services to support their livelihoods and food production - crops, fish and livestock.

Although the river is coming under increasing pressure and its catchment is being degraded rapidly, the Tana Basin is relatively water rich compared to the neighbouring Athi Basin, where Nairobi is located. To help meet growing demands, the proposed ‘Northern Water Collector Tunnel’ (NWCT) has been designed to transfer an additional 140,000m3 from the upper Tana to the capital. The project is estimated to cost 6.8 billion Kenyan shillings.

Inter-basin transfers are a means to tackle imbalances...Read more

Article originally posted in Economist Insights on World Environment Day.

Can you manage what you don’t measure?  Produce such as coffee, cotton, and oil are traded commodities that are measured, managed, negotiated and priced based on market supply and demand.  Yet, what happens when measuring things of great value that are more nuanced, more complex, not commodities, not privately owned and not traded in markets,  such as rainfall, rivers, wetlands, or biodiversity?

Designed for the World Forum on Natural Capital, this infographic illustrates the short-term value of felled trees to the timber industry when compared to the long-term benefits of healthy forests to society. The numbers speak for themselves, $0,4 trillion versus $3,7 trillion.

 This valuation approach is not new. Inspired by the Stern review, TEEB or ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ is a global initiative set up in 2007 that focuses on making nature’s values visible. As Prof. Ed Barbier (a member of TEEBs Advisory Board) puts it, “we use nature because it is valuable, we lose nature because it is free”.

 Adam Smith’s ‘Diamond-Water paradox’, differentiating value and price, states that water is considerably more valuable than diamonds, yet diamonds command a much higher price. This resonates with more people than ever before.  Daily news on floods and droughts, and the loss of services we receive from ecosystems is concerning.  Securing Water, Sustaining Growth from the Global Water Partnership/OECD Task Force on Water Security and Sustainable Growth, reports the ‘monetization of environmental risks, and the ecosystem services the aquatic environment renders’ – is classed as a pressing challenge we have still not been able to address. 

 Pollution, over-abstraction, dams altering river flows, deforestation causing soil erosion and desertification, and climate change can all have devastating impacts on our water resources. The...Read more