Water P-Notes
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These practitioner notes (P-Notes) are published by the Water Sector Board of the Sustainable Development Network of the World Bank Group. P-Notes are a synopsis of larger World Bank documents in the water sector.
Items in this collection
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Publication
Environmental Health and Child Survival
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-06)Interest in environmental health has increased in recent years, largely because the most vulnerable groups remain disproportionately exposed to and affected by health risks from environmental hazards. More than 40 percent of the global burden of disease attributed to environmental factors falls on children below five years of age, who account for about 10 percent of the world's population. Children are especially susceptible to environmental factors that put them at risk of developing illness early in life. Malnutrition is an important contributor to child mortality; malnutrition and environmental infections are inextricably linked, but these links have been forgotten or neglected by policy-makers. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently convened an expert panel, which concluded that about 50 percent of the consequences of malnutrition are in fact caused by inadequate water and sanitation provision and poor hygienic practices. Recent recognition of environmental linkages with malnutrition highlights the urgent need to develop a spectrum of interventions to reduce exposure to environmental risks. -
Publication
Public-Private Partnerships to Reform Urban Water Utilities in Western and Central Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-05)Western and Central Africa have lengthy experience with public-private partnerships (PPPs), both for water supply and for combined power and water supply utilities. Cote d'Ivoire's successful PPP dates from 1959, and, over the last two decades, as many as 15 out of 23 countries in the region have experimented with PPPs. Eleven PPPs are studied here, and detailed performance indicators are reported for six large cases-Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Gabon. These PPPs all have had at least four years of private operation. Through its successes and failures, the Western and Central African experience offers interesting lessons for other developing countries on how to improve the quality of urban water supply services, increase the efficiency of operations, and establish the financial credibility of the sector. -
Publication
Competition or Cooperation? A New Era for Agricultural Water Management
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-04)Reliable supplies of water for agriculture have helped meet rapidly rising demand for food in developing countries, making farms more profitable, reducing poverty, and helping vast regions of the world develop more dynamic and diversified economies. Can these successes be sustained with demand for food rising and water resources waning? That is the challenge now facing policy makers, planners, and practitioners in agricultural water management (AWM), as well as their allies in the World Bank and other development organizations. -
Publication
Securing Water for Agriculture : A Guide to Investment Decisions
(Washington, DC, 2009-04)How can the world grow more food, increase incomes, reduce poverty, and protect the environment with growing numbers of mouths to feed and increasingly constrained resources? A big part of the answer lies in better management of agricultural water. Agricultural water management (AWM) encompasses irrigation on both a large and small scale, drainage of irrigated and rain fed areas, watershed restoration, recycling of water, rainwater harvesting, and better in-field water management practices. There is considerable scope for improving returns on water from agricultural use. The key economic challenge is to set up an incentive framework that encourages efficient water use and profitable high value agriculture. Evidence indicates that such a framework improves efficiency and accountability, raises productivity, and promotes sustainable and environmentally responsible resource use. At the same time, irrigation schemes pose a financial challenge: to recover costs at a rate sufficient to finance services to farmers. The broad challenge is to encourage both large- and small-scale private investment. -
Publication
Toward Cleaner, Cheaper Power : Streamlined Licensing of Hydroelectric Projects in Brazil
(Washington, DC, 2009-02)Brazil is confronted with steadily increasing demands for electricity. The country has the ability to meet that demand by developing its considerable hydropower potential, but the regulatory process that governs the approval of new hydroelectric plants imposes unnecessary delays that push up project costs and increase uncertainty. The process, among other reasons, has created a shortage of investment in otherwise viable hydropower projects in favor of less efficient and more harmful technologies. Brazil's electricity sector serves roughly sixty million residential and commercial customers and generates revenues of US$20 billion. With demand growing at a rate of 4.4 percent annually, an additional 3,000 megawatts of generating power will be needed by 2015. The cost of the new power plants needed to provide that power is estimated at US$40 billion. Presently, five-sixths of the country's power needs are met by hydroelectric plants, though in recent years only half of the new plants receiving licenses to begin construction have been hydroelectric. The other half of the licenses have been issued for coal, diesel, and nuclear plants that provide electricity at higher unit costs than hydroelectric plants and have greater adverse effects on people and the environment. The seeming anomaly can be explained by the fact that the licensing process for thermal plants is simpler and more predictable than that for hydroelectric plants. -
Publication
Lessons for Managing Lake Basins : Measuring Good Governance
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-01)Lakes and reservoirs play a central role in integrated water resources management. Yet lake and reservoir basins have not received sufficient attention in global water policy discussion, even though lakes are essential to the lives of much of the world's population, and provide habitat for aquatic life. An analysis of experiences and lessons learned from 28 lakes around the world sought to identify practical lessons learned from management of lake basins, create new knowledge on lake basin management, fill an important gap in knowledge of lake basin management in developing countries, and derive lessons from internationally funded projects. The main focus of this note is to summarize the monitoring and evaluation indicators of good governance in lake basin management that were developed. -
Publication
Protecting the Quality of Public Water-Supply Sources : A Guide for Water Utilities, Municipal Authorities, and Environmental Agencies
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-01)Water-supply quality is too often taken for granted. Because we can see rivers and streams, they command most attention when talk turns to water quality but subsurface aquifers are every bit as important as a source of public water-supply and are also under threat of pollution. Acting now to protect them makes sound economic sense, because it is always cheaper to maintain the quality of groundwater resources, and of individual water-supply sources, than to mitigate the damage once done. But timely action depends on awareness of the urgent need to protect groundwater and to do this the authors must be able to identify clearly the threats they face. Because it is unrealistic to prohibit all potentially-polluting activities and the economically sound approach is to identify what are the most significant pollution threats, which parts of the land surface are most vulnerable to pollution of underlying groundwater and whether any such pollution will impact existing public water-supply sources. Such a procedure, which is described in this book, provides the direct focus required on the protection measures necessary to conserve the quality of any given groundwater supply source. -
Publication
Sink or Swim—Toward Water Security for All
(Washington, DC, 2008-06)Harnessing the productive potential of water and limiting its destructive impacts have challenged the human species since its origins. Many of the earliest civilizations, particularly those on the floodplains of the world's major rivers, succeeded by harnessing water, often in nation-building efforts that spawned great civilizations. But water is also a force for destruction, catastrophically through drought, flood, landslides, and epidemic, and progressively through erosion, inundation, desertification, contamination, and disease. Water also has been a source of dispute, particularly where it crosses jurisdictional boundaries. Today, where water supplies are adequate and reliable, societies are relatively rich. Water security was easily achieved in temperate climates where rainfall is not extremely variable. By contrast, where water is scarce, variable, and uncontrolled, most societies have remained poor, and basic water security has not been achieved. There are other reasons why societies are poor or rich, but the significance of water security is considerable, and little recognized. Over time, human beings have developed reservoirs of knowledge and experience about how to control and manage water, but, with economic development and population growth, the demands on water have grown apace. This is true in all industrial countries, which invested early and heavily in water infrastructure, institutions, and management capacity. It is equally true in developing countries, where investments in water development and management remain an urgent priority. In some developing countries, often the poorest, the severity of the challenge of managing water is almost without precedent.