Water Security Climate

In Asia and the Pacific, climate change is now a well-recognised risk to water security but responses to this risk are either under reported, or continue to be guided by the incremental or business as usual approaches. Water policy still tends to remain too narrow and fragmented, compared to the multi-sectoral and cross-scalar nature of risks to water security. What’s more, current water security debates tend to be framed in discipline specific or academic ways, failing to understand decision making and problem-solving contexts within which policy actors and partitioners have to operate on a daily basis. Much of the efforts to date has focussed on assessing and predicting the risks in the context of increasing levels of uncertainty. There is still limited analysis of emerging practices of risks assessment and mitigation in different contexts in Asia and the Pacific.

This book pursues a comprehensive approach so as to arrive at a better understanding of the implications of climate change on sustainable development, focusing on the perspective of water.

This book pursues a comprehensive approach so as to arrive at a better understanding of the implications of climate change on sustainable development, focusing on the perspective of water.

The role of water in our communities, from local to regional and right up to global levels, poses a series of key questions about climate change, about the anthropogenic impact on the environment, and about all the interconnected actions and events that affect the availability and quality of the resource. All these questions share a common demand for more scientific knowledge and information.

This contributed book, as a part of a series of CERES publications, provides a multi-regional and cross-sectoral analysis of the interlinkages, challenges, and emerging responses in the areas of water security, climate change, and food systems, especially in a context marked by severe implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, increased climate vulnerability of many regions already water stressed, and an ambitious global action aiming at curbing climate change and restoring ecosystem. In the first set of chapters, the water, food, and environmental/climate security nexus is explored theoretically and by reference to empirical research covering many regions and sectors. In another set of chapters, the impacts of climate change on water resources and water-stressed regions are identified along with their implications for food systems and security. Other chapters of the volume identify the emerging solutions to the nexus challenges, mainly adaptation and mitigation options, governance and management approaches, technological and economic solutions, innovative farming and water management practices, etc. Most chapters scheduled for publication address timely and future-oriented topics, are based on empirical research particularly done in water-constrained and climate vulnerable countries from Asia, Africa, and the MENA region, and provide policy-oriented inputs and recommendations to guide change processes at multiple scales.