AGWA's Technical Work
AGWA and its members are consistently working to advance the technical practices around resilient water management and climate adaptation, often with a focus on the ways in which we assess and reduce climate risk and other uncertainties within the decision making, planning, and operation processes associated with water resources management. AGWA’s technical programs cover a spectrum of activities, addressing needs around capacity building, climate-smart finance, and mainstreaming new best practices across sectors and categories of institutions.
Ongoing Initiatives
Knowledge Platform
AGWA maintains an additional website known as the Knowledge Platform, focusing entirely on a new generation of methodologies to assess and address climate risk and other uncertainties in water resources management. The Knowledge Platform is designed to provide resources, support, and capacity building materials around a complementary set of so-called “bottom-up approaches” to technical water management.
Training and Capacity Building
To ensure that new approaches to climate adaptation and risk assessment / reduction are effectively mainstreamed and brought to scale, AGWA and our partners organize both virtual and in-person training opportunities. Since 2018 we have worked closely with the UNFCCC Consultative Group of Experts (CGE) to work directly with national adaptation focal points to provide them with access and training on the state of the art in climate relevant knowledge. This line of work continues through the Adaptation Academy initiative conducted in conjunction with leading universities in water management. AGWA contributes to various online e-courses and MOOCs across a range of topics, in addition to hosting thematic webinars and workshops to build global and institutional capacity around “bottom-up approaches.”
Nature-based Resilience
AGWA is engaged in multiple efforts to mainstream nature-based solutions (NBS) within climate adaptation and resilience strategies. The multi-year EU funded NAIAD project focused on operationalizing the insurance value of ecosystems to reduce the human and economic cost of risks associated with water. Other efforts include our work to integrate ecosystems into standard engineering and design practices through Eco-Engineering Decision Scaling (EEDS), as well efforts to mainstream NBS within project development and procurement processes associated with multilateral development banks.
Climate Finance
For several years, AGWA has been working to influence the scope, scale, and credibility of climate finance. AGWA has taken a leading role in ongoing collaboration with Climate Bonds Initiative to create Water Infrastructure Criteria for climate bonds, while working with partners such as WRI to scale up efforts and utilization of climate bonds as finance for green and hybrid water infrastructure.
Private Sector Adaptation
While a high-level understanding of the risks of climate change to many industries appears well established, little general guidance exists to support most businesses in the practice of reducing climate risk or negotiating tradeoffs around climate change. Together with partners from various corporations and industry groups, AGWA is working to develop a neutral, crowd-sourced, and inter-organizational approach to identifying climate risk frameworks, strategies, and tradeoff considerations for the private sector.
Urban Resilience
As more people flock to cities around the globe, increasing demands are being placed on urban water systems. Climate change and other unprecedented stressors will exacerbate the challenges related to cities' water security in the decades to come. AGWA works with partner organizations to address the issues facing cities in terms of infrastructure, water supply / delivery, WASH, and other areas, including through our efforts with the ongoing City Water Resilience Approach.
SDG Tradeoffs Around Water, Climate, and the Environment
We are engaged in efforts to integrate water, ecosystems, and NBS within agriculture and resilience decision making. In particular, this line of work aims to create a framework and pathway for examining tradeoffs in national and subnational programs around several of the SDGS and is intended to explore how we operationalize the SDG agriculture production targets while also staying mindful of the two parts of the "utility" that supply agricultural water: ecosystems and the climate.