Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis: A collaborative workshop to address an uncertain future

Achieving and maintaining water security is increasingly challenging under current climatic variability and projected climate change, especially in vulnerable areas such as mountainous and semi-arid regions. Therefore, there is a need to identify pathways to integrate the science-based understanding of climate impacts on water security into mitigation and adaptation policies.
In collaboration with the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation, the US Army Corps of Engineers, Deltares and the Dutch Ministry of Water and Infrastructure, UNESCO and the International Centre for Integrated Water Resources Management have recently published a key publication on the ‘Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA): Collaborative Water Resources Planning for an Uncertain Future’. This CRIDA approach provides guidelines to assess water security vulnerabilities due to climate variability and change, and provides guidance on the development of adaptation pathways for robust water resources management.

Building further on these efforts, CRIDA case studies are needed to demonstrate the versatility of the approach and to adjust the developed tools and methodologies to the local context. Therefore, a capacity building workshop will be developed in Cape Town, Southern Africa, to train key stakeholders on the different aspects of the CRIDA approach and to move towards the identification of potential case studies for demonstrative purposes. The workshop will also serve as a stakeholder meeting to identify the potential for developing two full-scale project proposasl for the region, with one focussed over the Cape Town Area and a second one focussing on the Zambezi River Basin. This is particularly important in a region suffering from severe water insecurity over the last decades, as highlighted by the water shortages threatening the City of Cape Town in April 2018. The evaluation of the use of CRIDA in such a context is therefore highly relevant, and builds further on initial efforts that already started.

The training will be organized in the framework of the project “Enhancing Climate Services for Improved Water Resources Management in Vulnerable Regions to Climate Change: Case studies from Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean” (CliMWaR), which is supported by the Flemish UNESCO Science Trust Fund (FUST). Further information on the training will be made available via the website https://en.unesco.org/climwar