Water in landscapes

SIWI – Leading expert in water governance
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Why Water
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Water in landscapes

Water and Peace

When properly managed, water can be a peacemaking platform for long lasting cooperation

Water cooperation

Water is a growing concern in many parts of the world. Countries can improve their water resilience through transboundary water cooperation over shared waters.

Many of the most pressing challenges in the world are about water: too little, too much or too inferior. Such challenges can only be effectively addressed through adequate governance of available water resources.

Water and the 2030 Agenda

In 2015, the global community launched the 2030 Agenda, with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that should be reached by 2030. Some progress has been made, but for most of the goals, the world is not on track to meet the deadline. Water can help us do better.

Groundwater

Groundwater is the regulator of the entire freshwater cycle, but its invisibility makes it difficult to manage and protect.

Water and climate

The climate crisis is essentially a water crisis. When we treat it as such, we get new tools to mitigate climate change and adapt to consequences that are unavoidable.

Water scarcity

Insufficient supply and inadequate infrastructure leaves millions of people in the world without water.

Agriculture and water

How to increase the productivity of agriculture around the world through better water management.

The impact of COVID-19

The global COVID-19 pandemic has pushed millions of people back into poverty and exposed unacceptable gaps between the rich and the poor. One in three people are still not able to wash their hands with soap and water at home.

Indigenous knowledge

Indigenous peoples are the custodians of many of the world’s most fragile and important ecosystems. They also possess invaluable knowledge about sustainability and resilience, so they have a vital role in protecting our environment.

Source-to-Sea

The source-to-sea approach focuses on the strong connection between what happens on land, along waterways, and in the sea.

A growing number of people, societies and companies are discovering the power of resilient landscapes. It is still possible to shift to more sustainable practices that recharge water, restore soil health, sequester carbon, and strengthen biodiversity – but we need to make the transformation now.

Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)

More than two billion people in the world lack safely managed drinking water and twice as many lack safely managed sanitation, making WASH one of the most urgent development challenges.

Rivers

While we all depend heavily on rivers for our survival, many rivers are under constant threat from unsustainable human activities

PERSPECTIVES

Youth and water

More and more young people offer important contributions to solving the growing water challenges they are inheriting.

Human rights and water

Having access to water and sanitation has been recognized as a human right since 2010. But water is also essential to ensuring the fulfilment of many other rights.

Gender and water

To improve water governance, we need to take a close look at gender roles.

Humans rely on healthy ecosystems for almost everything, including the water we drink and the food that we eat. But unsustainable land use is bringing more and more ecosystems dangerously close to collapsing. Humans have disrupted the water cycle, eroded soil health, and caused massive loss of biodiversity. The result is increasingly degraded landscapes that eventually will not provide the clean water, fibre, energy, food, and carbon storage that our societies rely on.

The situation is serious: according to the Global Assessment on biodiversity and ecosystem services, we are already living in an era of mass extinction of species that could also threaten human existence. Particularly during times of abrupt change, such as the global warming we are currently experiencing, natural variations within species of ecosystems should be thought of as nature’s insurance policy. If the most common species in an ecosystem have trouble coping with a particular change, other varieties of that species may be better able to adapt and uphold the same function in a biodiverse ecosystem.

For decades, we have ignored this knowledge, and instead turned more and more land into cities or industrial farms with little to no room for biodiversity. We have dammed and diverted rivers to get energy and irrigation. Natural forests have been replaced with gigantic monocultures. To compensate for reduced soil quality, we have intensified the use of fertilisers, even though it pollutes rivers and groundwater.

These practices leave humans more vulnerable in the long run: less groundwater is recharged, the quality of water and soils continues to deteriorate, and we are more exposed to the droughts and floods that will increase in the wake of global warming. But there are alternatives and across the world people are rediscovering more sustainable forms of land use.

Water at the center of resilient landscapes

Increasingly, more farmers are exploring regenerative farming, where crop rotation, agroforestry, rainwater harvesting, and other practices make agriculture more robust and sustainable. Wetlands and forests are being restored. Communities are protecting their local watersheds and managing forests in a way that improves groundwater recharge. Cities are better integrating trees, wetlands, and farmlands to increase clean water, boost carbon storage, and reduce the risk of flooding. Agriculture and forestry are shifting to management practices that support biodiversity, water security, human well-being, and cultural values.

The water cycle is crucial to all of these processes. Landscapes with a well functioning hydrology cycle provide water and food, sustain biodiversity, and contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

What all these solutions have in common is that they help us tackle several of the world’s greatest challenges simultaneously. By innovatively working together with nature, we can improve the lives of the poorest societies, mitigate climate change, and strengthen biodiversity. Though extinct species cannot return, it is possible to restore ecosystems so that they again thrive and become more resilient, to the benefit of both humans and nature.