Editor’s choice
Water management that is environmentally sustainable and equitable requires a better understanding of connections beyond the watershed, inclusive participatory approaches, and the water needs of ecosystems.
SEI’s initiative, Water Beyond Boundaries, aims to deliver that knowledge and the tools to use it.
The Mekong river. Photo: Hannah Wright/Unsplash
Water management is getting increasingly difficult. Growing demand and a changing climate are posing critical challenges for policymakers, who must grapple with both an uncertain future and competing interests, ensuring water security for people, cities, agriculture, and ecosystems.
The status quo to addressing these challenges is Integrated Water Resource
Management (IWRM). While the past three decades have seen IWRM having a profound impact on water planning practices, it has not yet yielded sustainable water outcomes. The results can inadvertently create conflict, exclude critical users, or ignore gaps in water management.
The Stockholm Environment Institute is introducing new ways of thinking about sustainable water planning through its Water Beyond Boundaries (WBB) initiative. The objective is bold and ambitious: create a new agenda for managing water that addresses the challenges of scale, scope, and time, currently missing in IWRM applications.
This new agenda will be relevant, realistic, and rigorous, addressing the three gaps in the IWRM framework, stretching water management to be more comprehensive, successful, and inclusive.
Initiative / Our work aims to transform current decision making around access to water, the greatest risk to global prosperity, and addressing the SDGs.
Project / Bolivia WATCH works to arm the country's institutions with the information and capacity to connect two spheres: safe sanitation and watershed management.
Initiative / Our work aims to transform current decision making around access to water, the greatest risk to global prosperity, and addressing the SDGs.
Past event / How can we better understand and plan for the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on water and food security?
Perspective / Handwashing is the most effective way to prevent the spread of Covid-19 provided the poor and vulnerable have access to clean water.
