Water Papers

172 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10986/16997

Water Papers are produced by the Water Global Practice, taking up the work of the predecessor Water Unit, Transport, Water and ICT Department, Sustainable Development Vice Presidency.

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 10 of 172

Water Security and Climate Change: Insights from Country Climate and Development Reports
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-04) World Bank
This report, "Water Security and Climate Change: Insights from Country Climate and Development Reports," examines the crucial role of water in addressing climate change, drawing insights from the World Bank's Country Climate and Development Reports (CCDRs). The report highlights the significant impacts of climate change on water resources, including increased droughts, floods, and sea level rise, that threaten agricultural production, human health, and economic growth. It emphasizes the importance of water sector actions for both climate mitigation and adaptation, including investments in water infrastructure, demand-side management, and nature-based solutions. The report also addresses the challenges of financing water sector investments, the need for private sector participation, and the importance of strong governance and policy frameworks. Finally, it provides recommendations for future CCDRs, including the need for more comprehensive assessments of investment needs, improved modeling approaches, and a stronger focus on the water-jobs nexus and transboundary water management.
Reviving Lake Victoria: A Regional Approach to Inclusive Sanitation
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-18) Wanjiku, Pascaline; Kennedy-Walker, Ruth
Lake Victoria, a vital resource for East African countries, faces threats from unsustainable land management, human waste, and industrial effluent, impacting its water quality, biodiversity, and navigability. Recognized as a regional economic zone by the East African Community, the Lake Victoria Basin (LVB) requires aC coordinated regional approach to address these challenges. The Lakewide Inclusive Sanitation (LWIS) Strategy offers a multilateral solution to the basin's sanitation issues, exacerbated by rapid urbanization and inadequate wastewater treatment. With 33 million people in the LVB lacking improved sanitation, the LWIS Strategy aims to improve water quality and human capital through comprehensive sanitation improvements, technical innovation, institutional reforms, and financial mobilization. This approach also engages the private sector in innovation, service delivery, and job creation, emphasizing the need for a strong, coordinated regional effort to enhance lake functions, provide safe sanitation, and strengthen community resilience against climate change and other crises.
Accounting for Water Quality - Insights for Operational Task Teams
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-25) Chapman, Deborah V.; Karimi, Poolad; Valieva, Svetlana; Li, Ruyi; Talbi, Amal
For centuries, management of freshwater resources has focused on monitoring and managing water quantity to ensure supplies for domestic, agricultural, and industrial use and to mitigate the potential effects of floods and droughts. However, the quantity of water is inextricably linked to its quality, yet much less attention has been paid to the latter. Every human use of water, and the aquatic ecosystem itself, has minimum requirements for water quality. At a national scale, managing water quantity and water quality have often been the remit of different government agencies with limited sharing of information. This report summarizes key aspects and presents a framework to assist water accounting teams to evaluate the needs for incorporating water quality monitoring into their operations. The framework presented in this report introduces a step-by-step approach to defining scope and objectives and to identifying data needs and monitoring approaches for data collection and computation of loads. Data analysis and presentation options are also explored. Implementation of the framework is illustrated with three different scenarios of different scope and scale of water accounting activities: an irrigation scheme, a river basin, and a reservoir. The scenarios illustrate suggested locations for monitoring, relevant water quality parameters for inclusion, the time frame for data collection, and interpretation of the results.
Do National Visions and Climate Commitments across Sub-Saharan Africa Hold Water?: Africa Region Water and Climate Policy Note
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-30) de Waal, Dominick; Hamid, Mohamad Mahgoub
Water management is foundational for development and climate adaptation. Investments in water not only improve health and wealth of nations but can also buffer the impacts of climate change. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is the most vulnerable region to climate change impacts. This policy note examines national development vision documents and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) documents across SSA to: (1) review the extent to which water and water related climate priorities feature in them; (2) propose substantive improvements to the presentation of water and water related climate priorities; and, (3) identify practical ways water sector actors can engage in shaping national planning documents going forward. The analysis shows that water and water-related climate actions are not consistently included in either national vision documents or NDCs across SSA. Most country’s vision documents (91 percent) aimed to improve access to water supply and sanitation (WSS) but only half of the visions aimed to expand irrigation and hydropower. Water resources management (WRM), though referenced in two thirds of the visions was poorly defined and only very few cases described institutional mechanisms for managing water. Water adaptation measures featured in all SSA countries’ NDCs but were often generic in nature without clear indicators or targets. For example, early warning systems (EWS) were included in over two thirds of NDCs but only a few countries were specific about when or how EWS would be set up. WRM measures in NDCs were even less specific than those included in national visions. Water related mitigation measures in NDCs were less frequently included than adaptation measures. For example, only a quarter of NDCs mentioned improving energy efficiency in WSS and only one country set a specific target to reduce energy intensity. As vision documents and NDCs get revised there is a window of opportunity to ensure that water and its subsectors (WSS, irrigation, hydropower and WRM) are presented with clear indicators and targets. Half of the countries in SSA will revise their visons in the 2020s and NDCs are revised every 5 years.
From a Humanitarian to Development Approach: Uganda’s Ground-Breaking Journey to Achieve Sustainable Provision of Water Services to Refugees and Host Communities
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-06-20) Huang, Ai-Ju; Njoroge, David Githiri; Otiego, Lilian; Danilenko, Alexander
The number of refugees in Africa reached 6.9 million in 2021, nearly tripling over the past 15 years. Uganda alone hosts 1.5 million refugees, making it the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa and third in the world. Uganda has progressive refugee management policies that have welcomed refugees into the country for more than 70 years, with the average length of stay being seven to eight years. The pressure on water resources and infrastructure arising from the massive inflow and protracted stay of refugees is high and cannot be sustained solely through humanitarian interventions. The provision of water services in the refugee settlements under the humanitarian context is fragmented, and the actors supporting the refugee response can no longer provide effective and quality services because of financial and capacity constraints. This paper outlines Uganda’s pioneering shift from a traditional humanitarian water service model, designed for short-term emergencies, to a holistic approach that integrates refugees and host communities in long-term national development planning. It illustrates how Ugandan policy makers, the World Bank, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have come together to collectively design interventions at the national and local levels that have advanced this transition. The critical analytics, tools, and road maps generated through those interventions anchored the policy dialogues, reforms, and financing mechanisms that supported the transfer of water systems and provision services from humanitarian partners to national utilities. As a result, US$57 million of donor funds were mobilized and 50 water systems have already been transferred to national water providers, serving approximately 12 percent of the refugees and their host communities. Sharing the lessons learned from Uganda’s experience with World Bank project teams, partners, and other countries managing forced displacement may be beneficial as they strive to improve provision of water services to refugees and hosting communities.
Groundwater Quality: A Strategic Approach
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-17) World Bank
This policy brief highlights the key messages for policy makers from the World Bank report “Seeing the Invisible: A Strategic Report on Groundwater Quality” (Ravenscroft and Lytton 2022a). This report and “A Practical Manual on Groundwater Quality Monitoring” (Ravenscroft and Lytton 2022b) describe the types of contaminants in groundwater, tools and resources for their measurement and long-term monitoring, and techniques to protect the resource from being contaminated in the first place.
From Source to Sea: South Asia Water Initiative Completion Report 2013 - 2021
(Washington, DC, 2022) World Bank
This Completion Report summarizes cumulative results and outcomes for the South Asia Water Initiative (SAWI) Phase 2 (from 2013-2021). SAWI’s objective was to increase regional cooperation in the management of the major Himalayan river systems in South Asia to deliver sustainable, fair, and inclusive development and climate resilience. Four interlinked pathways supported the outcomes: (i) building confidence and trust among the countries – mainly by convening regional technical dialogues; (ii) generating new technical knowledge, including in partnership with others, for national programs to use and to help shift stakeholder perceptions; (iii) building capacity of key institutions and stakeholders by exposing them to regional collaboration efforts elsewhere and training them in the use of new tools and technologies to strengthen water resource management; and (iv) scoping and leveraging investments, most notably World Bank investments so that these new approaches could be embedded and taken to scale.
Glaciers, Rivers, and Springs: A Water Sector Diagnostic of Nepal
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022) Joseph, George
Nepal is rich in water resources with a dense network of glaciers, lakes, rivers, and springs that originate in the Himalayas. However, only an estimated 15 billion cubic meters (BCM) of the 225 BCM water available annually is utilized for economic and social purposes. Several elements have contributed to this low rate of utilization, including Nepal’s rugged geography, inadequate institutional capacity, a history of prolonged political instability, and highly skewed seasonality - more than 80 percent of the precipitation in a year falls within a span of four months. For sustained economic growth and poverty reduction, and to enhance shared prosperity, Nepal must increase its investments in water-related infrastructure and institutions and improve the effectiveness of these investments. Although there is much to be done to harness this vital resource, it is important to broaden the development focus and integrate hydropower in a larger water resource management strategy. This strategy will ensure that water is available for basic and economic needs - even through the dry season - as a core component of Nepal’s overall development plan. Given Nepal’s development context and challenges, this document aims to analyze the most pressing sector challenges and identify strategic sector priorities that are aligned with the country’s partnership framework. It offers a snapshot of water in Nepal’s development story and situates the water sector in the broader context of the national economy, highlighting the importance of managing water resources for sustained economic growth and poverty reduction. It then presents five pressing sector-related challenges and concludes with a set of priority areas.
Advancing Knowledge of the Water-Energy Nexus in the GCC Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022) Jägerskog, Anders; Barghouti, Shawki
Climate change and increasing population pressure make it increasingly urgent to find ways to improve the management of the water-energy nexus. The desalination, pumping, distribution, and treatment of water use significant energy resources. The extraction and production of energy consume substantial amounts of water resources. In addition, negative effects on the environment are often the consequences of the management of the water and energy sectors. The report highlights the prospects for addressing these and other challenges at the water-energy nexus. It does this by drawing, in part, on some of the most important breakthroughs in the nexus that have come from the region.
Water Matters: Resilient, Inclusive and Green Growth through Water Security in Latin America
(Washington, DC, 2022) World Bank
Water security is a matter of increasing concern across the world and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is no exception. With rapidly growing demands for water and increasing variability due to climate change, ensuring water access to all users and mitigating water-related risks should be at the center of national and regional adaptation strategies. With nearly a third of the world's water resources, the LAC region's development has been inadvertently driven by water. This rich water endowment has allowed LAC to position itself as the world's largest net food-exporting region and greenest in terms of electricity production through hydropower. Water has played a fundamental role in reducing poverty, preserving LAC's natural wealth, and accelerating economic growth. More importantly, access to safe drinking water and sanitation services has contributed to improve the health and living conditions of millions of people. Despite this progress, there are urgent water sector challenges that threaten the region's sustainable development. Access to water and sanitation services is inequitable, with greater gaps in rural, indigenous, and peri-urban communities. In addition, water-related extremes such as floods and droughts are becoming more frequent and severe, having negative effects in lower-income communities. These gaps are more likely to be broadened by unsustainable water management practices, growing demands by competing water users, increasing pollution, and climate change impacts. In LAC, inadequate infrastructure results in a lack of storage and limited investment reduces the capacity of institutions to achieve integrated water resources management and improve service provision. The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) conducts research, convenes multi stakeholder dialogues, builds institutional capacity, and provides policy advice to water decision-makers. Focused on improving water governance, the authors aim to contribute to more prosperous and inclusive societies.