A 400-year-old mesquite tree spreads its branches across its desert surroundings in Bahrain beneath a sunset of blue sky and pink clouds

Photo: aksphoto / Getty Images

Water management poses a critical development challenge in Bahrain. The vision of the Kingdom’s country-wide Water Resources Management (WRM) unit, under the Ministry of Oil, is for the Water-Climate Knowledge Platform to serve as a cross-sectoral tool that bridges the gap between climate information and water resource management in Bahrain. It also hopes to create the government’s technical capacity to monitor climate change’s impacts on the water and related economic sectors, as well as facilitate improved water demand management.

This project is a first step to achieving this vision: creating a Decision Support System and a Water-Climate Knowledge Platform that both communicates data and information and allows users to explore the water resource management and environmental impacts of changes in variables including climate, population growth rates, water use rates and desalination plant capacities.

The WCKP has been co-designed with the WRM. Once its design is finalized, the SEI–National Center for Atmospheric Research team will train Bahraini engineers and technicians to manage the WEAP model and the WCK platform. They will also train project steering committee members, representing key water resources management stakeholders, in its current use and potential to aid their mission to achieve resilient water management in the country.