Webinar: Climate Hope from the Dismal Science: How Macroeconomic Policy and Water Resilience Can Guide Us towards Prosperity

15 November 2023, 4:00-5:30 pm CET

Please register and join us next week for this webinar.

The past two decades have seen macroeconomic shocks and stresses ranging from currency crises to a global pandemic and failures in seemingly safe mortgage-backed securities. Adding to this complexity is the emergence of climate change, whose impacts are now driving significant losses across political borders and economic sectors. While engineers and planners have made progress on de-risking particular investments, resilience has not yet matured into an economic objective that can help guide countries and sectors to persist and even thrive in a dynamic, evolving climate. Policymakers need new tools and frameworks to move beyond de-risking and propel economies towards resilience despite profound uncertainties about the future.

One of the key insights emerging from groups such as the IPCC is that “water-based adaptation” is a strategic asset for promoting coherence, coordination, and efficacy for resilient programs, policies, and projects. Freshwater resources play a central but often hidden role across sectors as diverse as transportation, public health, energy, agriculture, ecosystems, and cities. Prevailing economic models treat water as a constant input rather than a shared and dynamic flow, ignoring the potential systemic risks as new and unforeseen conditions emerge. As a result, shocks and stresses in the water cycle can fray the unseen watery strings that stretch through investments, sectors, and regulatory boundaries. Whole sectors may be quite brittle to even small violations of assumptions about the availability of water resources. Rather than treating water as one of many potential hazards, we suggest that water should be used as a medium for economic resilience. 

In this webinar, we are excited to propose a new set of interventions and launch a new discussion about solutions that meet the scope of the resilience changes we now face. Our goal is to create a dialogue between policymakers and technical decision makers, focusing on leveraging economic and financial institutions to bolster economic resilience, grounded in tangible cases and operational recommendations.

Given that water is a climate-dynamic and uncertain flow brings in pressing questions. How do we negotiate tradeoffs in the present and for  the future? Can water resilience serve as an economic framework to orchestrate our management of economies? This webinar is structured to delve into some of the challenges and opportunities that can cultivate an economics of resilience. 

Who We Are

The Water Resilience for Economic Resilience (WR4ER) initiative is a global partnership that aims to harness the emerging insights on climate change and integrate them into economic planning and management. As a group, we believe resilience is not an accident but should be a deliberate, planned outcome that requires careful planning and strategic investment.

We are excited to announce that we will be launching our final report at COP 28. Over the coming year, we will be hosting a series of webinars to further engage with our audience, to show examples and cases, and to share insights and recommendations. Stay tuned for more details on these upcoming webinars and join us in our efforts to promote water resilience for economic sustainability.

Convenors

Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA), Germany: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), France: Ministry Ecology, Energy, and Territories; Germany: Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), United States: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United States: State Department, UK: Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, Netherlands: Ministry for Infrastructure and Water, Spain: Ministry for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, Australia: Australian Water Partnership, Global Commons Alliance, Asian Development Bank, Deltares, French Water Partnership, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Veolia, Water Policy Group, Wetlands International, World Bank