Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis note discusses the challenges of water service delivery before, during and after protracted armed conflict, focusing on barriers that may impede successful transition from emergency to development interventions. The barriers are grouped according to three major contributing factors (three "C"s): culture (organizational goals and procedures), cash (financing practices) and capacity (know-how). By way of examples, the note explores ways in which development agencies can overcome these barriers during the three phases of a protracted armed conflict, using examples of World Bank projects and experiences in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. Before the crisis, development agencies need to work to prevent armed conflict. In a situation of active armed conflict or when conflict escalates, development agencies need to remain engaged as much as possible, as this will speed up post-conflict recovery. When conflict subsides, development agencies need to balance the relative effort placed on providing urgently needed emergency relief and water supply and sanitation services with the effort placed on re-establishing sector oversight roles and capacity of local institutions to oversee and manage service delivery in the long term.

Front Cover -- Contents -- Foreword -- Main Messages -- Acknowledgments -- About the Authors -- Executive Summary -- Abbreviations -- Part I The Status Quo Institutions That Allocate Water -- Chapter 1 An Economic View of Water Scarcity: The Inescapable Role of the State in Allocating Water -- Introduction -- What is the price of water? -- Identifying reform directions using an economic lens -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 2 Middle East and North Africa: Diversity of Economic and Hydrological Context -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 3 Supply-Side Institutions That Build Large Infrastructure but Fail to Reduce Water Stress -- Origins and evolution of water institutions in the Middle East and North Africa -- Industrial-scale expansion of water-related infrastructure -- Signs of distress in managing supply-side infrastructure -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 4 Demand-Side Behavior That Challenges States' Ability to Raise Finance and Regulate Water -- Drivers of water demand -- How the two main consumptive uses of water-irrigated agriculture and cities-interact and shape long-term financing options -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 5 Externalities: Status and Trends of Water Depletion and Pollution -- Identification of externalities is a first step toward valuing water -- Water depletion -- Pollution of freshwater and marine resources -- compound effects of water-related externalities -- Hidden costs of water-related externalities -- Notes -- References -- Part II Understanding Why Status Quo Institutions Produce Outcomes That Endanger Water Security and Well-Being -- Chapter 6 Economic Framework to Understand How State Institutions Function in Allocating, Managing, and Investing in Water -- Introduction -- The framework -- Applying the framework to understand the state's tariff and revenue-raising capacity to invest in water.

First published online: 20 March 2020 ; Water scarcity in the Arab region is intensifying due to population growth, economic development, and the impacts of climate change. It is manifested in groundwater depletion, freshwater ecosystem degradation, deteriorating water quality, low levels of water storage per capita, and added pressures on transboundary water resources. High-income Arab countries have sought to circumvent the ever-present challenges of water scarcity through agricultural imports (virtual water trade), desalination, and, increasingly, wastewater reuse. In this review article, we argue that the narrative of water scarcity and supply-side technological fixes masks more systemic issues that threaten sustainable water management, including underperforming water utilities, protracted armed conflict and displacement, agricultural policies aimed at self-sufficiency, evolving food consumption behaviors, the future of energy markets, and educational policy. Water management challenges, particularly on the demand side, and responses in the Arab region cannot be understood in isolation from these broader regional and international political and socioeconomic trends. Recognizing the complex and interdependent challenges of water management is the first step in reforming approaches and shifting to more sustainable development outcomes and stability in the Arab region and beyond.

This report builds on prior work to provide a new, comprehensive, and balanced view of water security in Pakistan, stressing the importance of the diverse social, environmental, and economic outcomes from water. The report highlights the complex water issues that Pakistan must tackle to improve water security and sheds new light on conventional assumptions around water. It seeks to elevate water security as an issue critical for national development. The report assesses current water security and identifies important water-related challenges that may hinder progress in economic and human development. It identifies unmitigated water-related risks, as well as opportunities where water can contribute to economic growth and poverty reduction. The report analyzes how the performance and architecture of the water sector are related to broader economic, social, and environmental outcomes. It models alternative economic trajectories to identify where intervention can lead to a more water-secure future. A consideration of water sector architecture and performance and how these determine outcome leads to recommendations for improving aspects of sector performance and adjusting sector architecture for better outcomes. The sector performance analysis considers (a) management of the water resource, (b) delivery of water services, and (c) mitigation of water-related risks. The description of sector architecture considers water governance, infrastructure, and financing.

AbstractResilient water supplies in England need to be secured in the face of challenges of population growth, climate change and environmental sustainability. We propose a blueprint for water resources planning that uses system simulation modelling to estimate the frequency, duration and severity of water shortages at present and in the context of future plans and scenarios. We use multiobjective optimisation tools to explore trade‐offs between these risk metrics and cost of alternative plans, and we use sensitivity analysis to identify plans that robustly achieve targets for tolerable risk, alongside other performance objectives. The results of a case study in the Thames basin demonstrate that the proposed methodology is feasible given commonly available data sets and models. The proposed method provides evidence with which to develop water resource management plans that demonstrably balance the risks of water shortages, costs to water users and environmental constraints in an uncertain future.

Abstract. This paper discusses how epistemic uncertainties are currently considered in the most widely occurring natural hazard areas, including floods, landslides and debris flows, dam safety, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic ash clouds and pyroclastic flows, and wind storms. Our aim is to provide an overview of the types of epistemic uncertainty in the analysis of these natural hazards and to discuss how they have been treated so far to bring out some commonalities and differences. The breadth of our study makes it difficult to go into great detail on each aspect covered here; hence the focus lies on providing an overview and on citing key literature. We find that in current probabilistic approaches to the problem, uncertainties are all too often treated as if, at some fundamental level, they are aleatory in nature. This can be a tempting choice when knowledge of more complex structures is difficult to determine but not acknowledging the epistemic nature of many sources of uncertainty will compromise any risk analysis. We do not imply that probabilistic uncertainty estimation necessarily ignores the epistemic nature of uncertainties in natural hazards; expert elicitation for example can be set within a probabilistic framework to do just that. However, we suggest that the use of simple aleatory distributional models, common in current practice, will underestimate the potential variability in assessing hazards, consequences, and risks. A commonality across all approaches is that every analysis is necessarily conditional on the assumptions made about the nature of the sources of epistemic uncertainty. It is therefore important to record the assumptions made and to evaluate their impact on the uncertainty estimate. Additional guidelines for good practice based on this review are suggested in the companion paper (Part 2).