Kicking Off The Water Tracker For National Climate Planning
With the support of the UK government and under the water sector workstream of the newly formed Adaptation Action Coalition (AAC), AGWA is launching the Water Tracker, a new diagnostic tool that will help countries self-assess and enhance water resilience in their national climate planning.
The Water Tracker acknowledges that water is an essential component in taking action on climate change. Water plays a significant role in both climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies – including reducing carbon emissions, generating renewable energy, and sequestering carbon, for example, as well as in adaptation planning, including expanding irrigation in agriculture; ensuring reliable water, sanitation, and hygiene access; managing urban flooding; and drought, and producing industrial goods such as semiconductors and raw materials. Amidst increasing climate variability, developing strategies for water resilience is critical for robust climate policy across all sectors.
The Adaptation Action Coalition (AAC) is an international coalition aimed at raising global ambition in developing a more resilient, adaptable society in the face of all stressors. COP26 President Designate Alok Sharma announced the Tracker as the first international collaboration of the AAC at the Petersburg Climate Dialogue in May 2021, commissioned to support the development of “detailed, consistent [national climate] plans to help attract public and private funding.”
The Water Tracker seeks to streamline climate planning, coordination, and investment from all aspects of the climate conversation by contributing to the standardization of best practices for water resilience. National climate planners and policy makers will be able to use the Water Tracker to integrate water resilience as they develop and revise NDCs, National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), and other national climate plans.
Meanwhile, ministries, civil society organizations, investment banks, and aid agencies will be able to use the tool to more easily evaluate credibility and efficacy of NDCs, NAPs, and other national and sectoral level plans. The Tracker will be developed to allow for more fluid financial flows toward bankable investment and adaptation projects that meet national and global climate targets.
In the project’s first iteration, partners will work with a set of countries that have committed to water resilience as part of their national climate plans. Together with international coalitions, non-governmental organizations, and financing institutions, the first cohort of countries will co-design and co-create the Water Tracker. Using a pilot version of the tool, these countries will self-assess water resiliency in their climate plans and provide feedback and recommendations for further refinement of the Tracker. The data and results from this pilot version will be presented at COP26, and then a second cohort of countries will be recruited to apply the Tracker.
We hope you will follow along with the Water Tracker’s progress. AGWA is excited to work on this new tool for climate action alongside the Global Water Partnership (GWP), Sanitation and Water for All (SWA), and UNICEF.