Hydro Nation Virtual Water Pavilion

This session - jointly organized by the UN-Water Expert Group and the Water and Climate Coalition - will highlight the cross-cutting role of water solutions for adaptation and mitigation. It will showcase how water and climate change adaptation can be integrated into national policies, such as NDCs, as well as how to mobilize financing for climate-resilient water management. Ways to involve communities, vulnerable people, women, youth and civil society to build resilience will be presented and discussed with the audience.

Further info at:

https://www.waterforclimate.net/meetings/virtual/NBE8KHeLxDMyYGRyT

Tune in to view live, from 9 AM UK time, Thursday 28 and Friday 29 October. The forum will be streamed live, just go to the Front Page of www.ooskanews.com on the day. The event will also be video-recorded for those who can't be there on the day.

Given the multidimensional, multi-sectoral and multi-issues nature of water security under climate change, Prof Asit K. Biswas and Prof Cecilia Tortajada are hosting a 1½-day hybrid meeting on the topic, with the support of the University of Glasgow and the Scottish Government at the Senate Room, University of Glasgow, 28-29 October.

For this high-level forum, speakers include Ministers, heads of international organisations, leading figures from public and private sectors, eminent academics from different parts of the world, from different disciplines, to share their views on the problems and their likely solutions.

Each invited speaker will make three most important takeaways based on their knowledge and experience. Thereafter, there will be a dialogue between the invited speakers and the global audience.

The meeting will be livestreamed by OOSKAnews. Any interested person is cordially invited to join us! Sharing and embedding of the video content is encouraged.

The majority of the invited speakers have contributed papers. These have just been published by Springer Nature as a book: Water Security under Climate Change.

Tune in to view live, from 9 AM UK time, Thursday 28 and Friday 29 October. The forum will be streamed live, just go to the Front Page of www.ooskanews.com on the day. The event will also be video-recorded for those who can't be there on the day.

Given the multidimensional, multi-sectoral and multi-issues nature of water security under climate change, Prof Asit K. Biswas and Prof Cecilia Tortajada are hosting a 1½-day hybrid meeting on the topic, with the support of the University of Glasgow and the Scottish Government at the Senate Room, University of Glasgow, 28-29 October.

For this high-level forum, speakers include Ministers, heads of international organisations, leading figures from public and private sectors, eminent academics from different parts of the world, from different disciplines, to share their views on the problems and their likely solutions.

Each invited speaker will make three most important takeaways based on their knowledge and experience. Thereafter, there will be a dialogue between the invited speakers and the global audience.

The meeting will be livestreamed by OOSKAnews. Any interested person is cordially invited to join us! Sharing and embedding of the video content is encouraged.

The majority of the invited speakers have contributed papers. These have just been published by Springer Nature as a book: Water Security under Climate Change (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-981-16-5493-0).

The first Water Pavilion at a COP - A celebration

18:45 - 19:00 High Level welcoming remarks

19:00 - 19:15 Performance by Låpsley

19:15 - 20:00 Water Pavilion Reception

Two billion people around the world are living in water-stressed areas and the climate crisis is only serving to make this worse by prolonging droughts and intensifying floods. With water use and management accounting for up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is imperative that governments and water companies work together to achieve net zero. This means transitioning to renewable energy, mitigating their carbon emissions and reducing the nitrous oxide and methane emissions that come from wastewater treatment.

In the UK in 2020, water companies spear-headed the industry’s low-carbon journey with the publication of the Net Zero 2030 Routemap – the world’s first detailed sector-wide plan to reach net zero on operational emissions by 2030.

In this event, Water UK will host a discussion with UK representatives and colleagues from around the world to discuss how they are tackling the dual challenge of reducing emissions and ensuring water resilience. The event will explore how water companies are tackling the race to net zero, how they are ensuring resilience is embedded into these plans and how they plan to progress once they’ve achieved the ‘easy wins’.

Water Pavilion launch event

The IPCC Working Group 1 report makes grim reading. Strong evidence from thousands of studies across the globe was brought together to detail how the climate is and will change. Floods, droughts and other extreme events like heatwaves and cyclones are the main ways in which people across the world are feeling the impacts of climate change, and it comes as no surprise that many of these impacts are water-related. Understanding the implications and regional variations highlighted by the IPCC report for future water management is crucial. In this session, the authors of the IPCC report will share insights about water-related changes, including extreme weather events due to climate change and panelists' will discuss the implications of the same for adaptation and mitigation. 

Further info at: 

https://www.waterforclimate.net/meetings/virtual/3Ttcn88wWzC427E3N

Freshwater-related mitigation measures in water systems, energy systems and ecosystems (such as wetlands and other inland water ecosystems, forest, croplands, rangelands); Mitigation within the water-sanitation-hygiene sector, including links to energy and cities-infrastructure; Educate on the water sectors collective GHG emission impact, celebrate those utilities who have already made a Net Zero commitment, and call other corporations and utilities to make their own commitment. 

Further info at:

https://www.waterforclimate.net/meetings/virtual/Ah6LpDqk9CJbL6geC

Introducing the Water Tracker for National Climate Planning! If climate action is to be effective, the vital role of water in mitigating and adapting to climate change must be recognized. Water is a critical resource for all sectors, understanding where and how water is needed for climate action is necessary now to avoid adverse outcomes, maladaptation, or outright project failure. This event will introduce a new tool for countries to assess water needs in their national climate planning and bring together leaders from around the globe to share good practices in adaptation and demonstrate the importance of placing water at the center of resilient climate planning. The Water Tracker for National Climate Planning is an initiative of the Egypt and UK-led Adaptation Action Coalition (AAC), and we will use this opportunity to showcase pilot country experiences applying the Water Tracker to their national climate plans and invite other countries to join the Coalition.

How can we plan for national economic resilience? In most countries, we lack effective, coherent, and credible strategies for economic resilience across sectors, regions, and levels of governance. Water resilience is one approach to negotiate tradeoffs and avoid traps, even under climatic, pandemic, and economic change and uncertainty.

Over the past decade, many institutions have developed powerful risk and economic assessment tools for investments in infrastructure, ecosystems, and communities that can guide us towards greater local-scale resilience. Recognizing the special roles and risks associated with the water resources embedded within those investments has been key to this progress. We know that resilience has a cost, and that different approaches to resilience will vary in efficacy, reach, coherence, and their resilience dividend. We have choices in how we pursue resilience.

However, these lessons have not scaled up to national levels, even though the global pandemic has provided both global and national stress testing for economic resilience comparable to other extreme threats such as ongoing climate change.

This session will explore how countries can develop national economic resilience strategies that reflect the insights gained from the practice and policy of water resilience, building upon insights from the Dasgupta review on the economics of biodiversity. Organized by the Water Resilience for Economic Resilience (WR4ER) partnership, we will discuss the merits of and need for developing an evidence-based quantitative framework to guide economic planners and decision-makers as they manage social, climatic, economic, and pandemic change and uncertainty.

Further info at: https://www.waterforclimate.net/meetings/virtual/srWXXQDRndtnuor9C