Asia

This report by United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reviews the importance of inland fisheries as an ecosystem service, the pressures upon them, and management approaches to sustain them and thus helps inform future approaches to conservation and management of freshwater ecosystems.

There is an urgent need for major investment in policy and management approaches that address the direct and indirect drivers of aquatic ecosystem degradation and loss of inland fisheries taking into account their role in sustainable development and human well being. The UNEP Ecosystem Management Programme (UNEP-EMP) provides an effective framework for pursuing this challenge.

Read More

This report by International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) deals with the impact of climate change on water resources and livelihoods in the Greater Himalayas. The greater Himalayan region “the roof of the world” – contains the most extensive and rugged high altitude areas on Earth, and the largest areas covered by glaciers and permafrost outside the polar regions.

The water resources from this area drain through ten of the largest rivers in Asia, in the basins of which more than 1.3 billion people find their livelihoods. The region and its water resources play an important role in global atmospheric circulation, biodiversity, rainfed and irrigated agriculture, and hydropower, as well as in the production of commodities exported to markets worldwide. The water resources of this region are currently facing threats from a multitude of driving forces.

Global warming is having a severe impact on the amount of snow and ice, which has serious implications for downstream water availability in both short and long term as up to 50 per cent of the average annual flows in the rivers are contributed by snow and glacial melting. The warming in the greater Himalayas has been much greater than the global average: for example, 0.6 degrees Celsius per decade in Nepal, compared with a global average of 0.74 degrees Celsius over the last 100 years.

Changes in precipitation are ambiguous with both increasing and decreasing trends in different parts of the region. The most serious changes are probably related to the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events, such as high intense rainfalls leading to flash floods, landslides and debris flows. There is a severe gap in the knowledge of the short and long-term implications of the impact of climate change on water and hazards in the Himalayas, and their downstream river basins.

Most studies have excluded the Himalayan region because of its extreme and complex topography and the lack of adequate rain gauge data. There is an urgent need to close the knowledge gap by establishing monitoring schemes for snow, ice, and water; downscaling climate models; applying hydrological models to predict water availability; and developing basin wide scenarios which also take water demand and socioeconomic development into account.

Climate change induced hazards such as floods, landslides, and droughts will impose significant stresses on the livelihoods of mountain people and downstream populations. Society will need to improve its adaptation strategies, and level structural inequalities that make adaptation by poor people more difficult. It is important to strengthen local knowledge, innovations, and practices within social and ecological systems as well as strengthening the functioning of institutions relevant for adaptation. Sound science together with credible, salient, legitimate knowledge is important to support the development and implementation of sound policies.

Download the report here -

This report by the Strategic Foresight Group is a follow-up to its earlier report The Himalayan Challenge: Water Security in Emerging Asia, 2010 and provides ideas for cooperative solutions to enhance water security in Asia. The growing water stress, plans for dams on shared rivers, and uncertainties about the precise impact of climate change have brought water to the forefront of the political agenda of countries in the Himalayan River Basins.

The report recommends policy options for national governments as well as strategies which can be implemented by local authorities and community groups in a politically viable manner. Some of the ideas may on the surface appear to be addressing micro-level issues. However, such micro-level issues do have an important bearing on security at the macro-level in a large continent such as Asia. This is the experience of many other regions as well, as illustrated in several of the chapters in this report.

The objective of this report is to explore how river basins in the Himalayan region, and particularly shared water resources, can foster cooperation and security between Bangladesh, China, India and Nepal. The conventional view is that depleting water resources, growing problem of pollution, uncertain risks posed by climate change together may lead to competition for resources, migration, social instability, internal conflicts and diplomatic tensions between countries. This view is realistic and was discussed in detail in a previous report of Strategic Foresight Group. It has contributed to spreading the awareness of security risks associated with water crisis in the Himalayan region.

Read More

The purpose of this handbook “Right to Water and Sanitation” by Freshwater Action Network (FAN) Global is to help civil society and those working on water and sanitation issues to adopt a human rights-based approach to advocacy, so that they can improve water and sanitation service regulation and provision at international, national and local levels. Directed primarily at community groups, human rights NGOs, rights-based development practitioners and aid workers, this handbook aims to strengthen human rights-based advocacy by providing innovative and practical suggestions that activists and organisations can use in their work. It also acts as a resource guide for finding further information.

Water and sanitation are essential for living a healthy life with dignity. However, around a billion people across the world lack access to a safe and sufficient water supply to cover their basic needs. Over 2.5 billion people lack access to adequate sanitation and nearly 1.2 billion face the indignity of open defecation every day.

The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015 is seriously off track, with sanitation severely lagging behind. For example, estimates suggest that at current rates of progress, sub-Saharan Africa will miss the MDG water target by about 25 years, while the sanitation target may not be reached until well into the 22nd century.

Read More