The Caribbean Water Initiative (CARIWIN) has as its goal to increase the capacity of Caribbean countries to deliver IWRM, through collaboration with government agencies, regional and national networks, and community water users in its three partner countries – Grenada, Guyana and Jamaica.
Jointly led by the Brace Centre for Water Resources at McGill University, Canada, and the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH), Barbados, CARIWIN aims to integrate the IWRM approach into the CIMH activities in order to build regional capacity to meet water management needs.
The Institute is proactively modernizing its data archiving in frastructure in order to host the databases from the newly developed National Water Information Systems, born from IWRM principles. The Water Forum for the Americas was held in 2008 in preparation for the 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul in 2009. In its report for the Caribbean sub‐region, a number of challenges for water resources management were highlighted: population growth, increased water demand resulting from rapid growth in urbanisation and tourism, increased competition for land and water resources, increased climate variability and frequency of natural disasters, and pollution from industrial, agricultural and municipal wastes (Chase, 2008). CARIWIN’s contributions to water resources' management in the Caribbean were recognised in this report in the section “Progress made to meet the challenges”.
The report concluded that “an integrated and comprehensive approach towards water management is the correct way to face the challenges of managing a multiple‐use resource, such as water.”