Water Papers

170 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.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 35

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 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.
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.
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.
Argentina Valuing Water: Brief for Policy Makers
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06-23) World Bank
This brief for policy makers is a summary of the main conclusions derived from the “Argentina: Valuing Water” report, a detailed and technical water security diagnostic, and is designed for decision makers beyond the water sector. Its main purpose is to make visible the importance of water, and the cost of existing water security gaps on Argentina’s economy, society and environment. The report further highlights the causes behind those water security gaps and identifies opportunities to close them and make the country more resilient to climate change or to other shocks such as the COVID-19, through a more sustainable, inclusive and efficient water management. The document assesses the water security situation today, evaluating the impacts of these water security gaps in the country’s GDP, and then proposes two future scenarios up to 2030: the first one is a “business as usual” scenario, where there are no changes in the way water is managed today, and where water security gaps perpetuate or amplify due to climate change and growing demands. The second “active scenario” is that one where a series of investments are proposed to close the existing gaps, and where, most importantly, a number of water governance reforms are recommended to complement such investments and to make them more sustainable. These reforms are also necessary to use public funds more efficiently, a priority measure in times of crisis.
Groundwater in Pakistan’s Indus Basin: Present and Future Prospects
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-01) Lytton, Lucy; Ali, Akthar; Garthwaite, Bill; Punthakey, Jehangir F.; Saeed, Basharat
Groundwater is arguably the most poorly understood water resource in Pakistan a country in which matters of water resources are hotly debated on a regular basis. Groundwater has the potential to be the most reliable water resource for Pakistan, providing a buffer against the unpredictability of climate change and the failure of infrastructure designed to deliver surface water. The Indus basin groundwater aquifer in Pakistan holds in storage at least eighty times the volume of fresh water held in the country’s three biggest dams. In the 1960s, large-scale extraction from this underground storage began and has expanded to become an essential input to agriculture and the backbone of domestic water provision. Yet in 2020, Pakistan is on the brink of a lengthy and severe groundwater crisis. Pakistan lacks a comprehensive, reliable system for measuring groundwater extractions and their impact on the resource base. In the face of rising population, the effects of climate change, and the considerable natural lag in groundwater response to management interventions, the failure to tackle these challenges is already impairing national water security and drinking water quality. It was concluded that the lack of good-quality, long-term groundwater data in Pakistan’s Indus basin greatly complicates the task of numerical modeling and reduces the reliability of the results.
Resilient Water Infrastructure Design Brief
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020) World Bank
The purpose of the Resilient Water Infrastructure Design Brief is to guide users on how resilience can be built into the engineering design of their project. With a focus on the three natural hazards most likely to affect water and sanitation infrastructure (droughts, floods, and high winds from storms), the document provides a six-step process to help users address weather and climate related challenges that are most likely to affect an infrastructure component at some point in its operational lifetime. In order to achieve both systems level resilience and infrastructure level resilience, this design brief should be used in tandem with other World Bank publications, such as the 2018 guidance document “Building the Resilience of WSS Utilities to Climate Change and Other Threats: A Road Map,” which emphasizes systems level resilience and analysis. The design brief highlights the relationship between these two documents and the unique function that each serves in improving overall resilience in the water sector. It also includes guidance for users to incorporate resilience design principles into projects’ appraisal documents and a sample module/task description for applying the two documents to an engineering design or feasibility study terms of reference.
Water Scarcity in Morocco: Analysis of Key Water Challenges
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01) Taheripour, Farzad; Tyner, Wallace E.; Haqiqi, Iman; Sajedinia, Ehsanreza
Morocco is expected to be faced with a major water shortfall prompted by either expansion in demand for water or reduction in precipitation induced by climate change. This paper examines the economywide impacts of these factors for Morocco. It uses a computable general equilibrium model augmented with submodules that trace consumption of water by uses and land allocation across sectors including crops, livestock, and forestry. Results show that water scarcity and changes in crop yields induced by climate change could reduce the GDP of Morocco up to 6.7 billion US dollars per year at 2016 constant prices and eliminate many job opportunities, in particular in the rural areas of this country. Only a portion of these negative impacts can be removed with improvements in water use efficiency. The factors mentioned above will reduce productivity of Morocco’s cropland and have the potential to reduce irrigated areas. Due to these changes, production of crops and food products are expected to fall, with increases in crop prices by up to 14.3 percent, assuming other factors being equal. Investment in water use efficiency practices that save water, in particular in agricultural activities, and shifting toward more valuable and less water intensive crops can help to partially mitigate these adverse impacts.
Salt of the Earth: Quantifying the Impact of Water Salinity on Global Agricultural Productivity
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12-10) Desbureaux, Sebastien; Russ, Jason; Escurra, Jorge; Damania, Richard; Rodella, Aude-Sophie; Zaveri, Esha
Salinity in surface waters is on the rise throughout much of the world. Many factors contribute to this change including increased water extraction, poor irrigation management, and sea-level rise. To date no study has attempted to quantify impacts on global food production. In this paper we develop a plausibly causal model to test the sensitivity of global and regional agricultural productivity to changes in water salinity. To do so, we utilize several local and global datasets on water quality and agricultural productivity and a model which isolates the impact of exogenous changes in water salinity on yields. We then train a machine learning model to predict salinity globally in order to simulate average global food losses from 2000-2013. These losses are found to be high, in the range of the equivalent of 124 trillion kilocalories, or enough to feed over 170 million people every day, each year. Global maps building on these results show that pockets of high losses occur on all continents but can be expected to be particularly problematic in regions already experiencing malnutrition challenges.