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 50

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.
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.
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.
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.
Trishuli Assessment Tool - Field Manual: A Standardized Methodology for Freshwater Aquatic Biodiversity Sampling and Long-Term Monitoring for Hydropower Projects in the Himalayan Region
(Washington, DC, 2021) International Finance Corporation
The Trishuli Assessment Tool is a standardized methodology for sampling freshwater aquatic biodiversity in hydropower projects. This tool was developed to: 1) strengthen the collection of aquatic biodiversity data for environmental impact assessments (EIAs) and international-level environmental and social impact assessments (ESIAs); and 2) provide a simple yet standardized method for the long-term monitoring of aquatic biodiversity in relation to hydropower projects. The tool was developed by a group of 30 international and Nepalese aquatic scientists at a workshop in 2019 and tested during a field survey in 2020. It provides a field sampling methodology for three focal groups of aquatic biodiversity: fish, macroinvertebrates, and periphyton as indicators of overall aquatic biodiversity. This field manual provides guidance for implementing the Trishuli assessment tool in the rivers of Nepal and other Himalayan regions. The manual is applicable to all types of hydropower projects (HPPs), from small run-of-river to larger peaking projects because all of them have some impact on the aquatic environment.
Using the Hydropower Sustainability Tools in World Bank Group Client Countries: Lessons Learned and Recommendations
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12) Lyon, Kimberly
The Hydropower Sustainability Tools (HSTs) are a suite of assessment tools and guidance documents developed by a multi-stakeholder forum, aimed at driving continuous improvement in hydropower development and operations. They are useful beyond their original purpose as audit tools and can be used in World Bank Group (WBG) client countries to build capacity for sustainable hydropower. The environmental, social, and governance topics addressed by the HSTs are deliberately aligned with WBG frameworks, which provides opportunities for the tools to be used as complements to World Bank Group standards, including to help clients meet WBG requirements and support WBG staff in their due diligence and supervision. It is, however, important that WBG staff should give careful thought to selecting the tool that is most appropriate, given the nature and status of a project, and in a way that is consistent with policy requirements. The tools can also be used voluntarily by WBG client countries in the absence of WBG financing. The HSTs are widely regarded as useful reference tools and recognized as the best currently available measuring stick for principles of sustainable hydropower.