September 2020 Newsletter Essay

Greetings! Lots of updates this month!

Perhaps three of the most frightening words for me to hear in a conversation are “climate change expert”; in a field that moves this quickly, humility and patience are more important than confidence and overpromising. AGWA, however, is like a hive-mind, gathering insights, evidence, and collective support into usable forms by networking and crowd-sourcing. Collectively, we are a gigantic climate change expert.

Given that perspective, AGWA is organizing our work over the coming year along three questions:

• Can we make businesses and corporations a key ally in practicing climate adaptation on the ground as well as when we engage policymakers?

• How do we build capacity around water resilience to implement global policy agreements around water and climate change?

• How we do gather the technical and finance insights to enable resilient infrastructure, including governance, nature-based solutions, and planning and design?

We hope you will join us in the coming year along these paths.

We also have two new members of AGWA’s Board, selected by voting at our annual meeting:

• Thandie Mwape Villadsen has global experience in international & development affairs spanning 20 years in Africa, Asia, Europe and Americas with the United Nations and Red Cross Red Crescent Movement. She is the Humanitarian Diplomacy Coordinator (global policy adviser) on a Dutch-government funded initiative, Partners for Resilience (PfR), and based at the Netherlands Red Cross.

• Belynda Petrie has 19 years’ experience in international development on climate change, water, energy, capacity building, skills and knowledge transfer. This follows 12 years’ corporate experience including Board Directorships on two multinationals. She is the CEO of OneWorld Sustainable Investments and based in South Africa.

John H Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA