AGWA at #AGU20: Mainstreaming resilience with multilateral development banks

“We build things that last 300 years. Why don’t we think about sustainability for that long?”

-Senior manager, World Bank, Feb 2017

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) control significant spending when it comes to water projects. They fund large, long lasting infrastructure, such as dams, that need to be able to maintain their functions throughout their long lifetimes. These projects have not historically included climate change concerns in their designs. As a result, MDB investments are exposed to large amounts of climate risk. There is a growing need for MDBs to find ways to build climate resilience into their projects and operations in order to ensure that projects can persist, adapt, and transform under climate change and deep uncertainty.

During a recent session at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall 2020 meeting, AGWA’s Executive Director John Matthews presented on the importance of working with MDBs to build climate resilience in the water sector. The presentation provided an overview of risk assessment and planning under deep uncertainty, climate risk in MDB projects, climate mainstreaming in MDBs, and examples of collaboration with MDBs - with the World Bank in water security in Mexico City and with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) on Nature-based solutions.

AGWA is continuing to grow in this sector and is currently working with the ADB to develop a long-term resilience strategy for mainstreaming climate change in the water sector, to be released in 2021.