Academic paper outlining the challenges of increasing water resilience, and the need for cross-sectoral approaches.
Population growth, climate change, and urbanisation among other factors are combining to build pressure on water, energy, and ecosystem services around the world. This short paper produced for World Water Week in Stockholm, 2013, reflects on the need for cross-sectoral approaches to help build water resilience in the face of these converging challenges. Cross-sectoral cooperation and integration is crucial for increasing the water-resilience of society, particularly reducing hydro-climatic hazards, and securing water availability of sufficient quantity and quality. A number of challenges to future socio-ecological well-being and growth are identified, beginning with unprecedented threat of climate change, and the location of water within these challenges. From extreme climatic events such as flooding and drought, to increasing water-stress impacting ecosystems, biodiversity, and freshwater consumption, water-related challenges and how to build resilience against them are issues that desperately require a greater focus. A number of other factors are highlighted as driving these pressures, including increasing living-standards, population, and industry-related activity accelerating demand. Four main strategies are identified by the authors as being of pivotal importance: ensuring sustainable utilisation of ecosystems and their services; ensuring that interventions for increased resilience are tailor-made to local conditions and knowledge; broadening livelihood opportunities so as to diversify income streams and remove single points of failure; and facilitating interactions between rural and urban areas and processes, so as to enhance water resilience. These four strategies are discussed in some depth, including specific case study examples. The paper closes with a call for the need to mobilise for water resilience, noting that the challenges mentioned are to a large extent human-induced; over-demand, rather than under-supply. The solution to these challenges therefore also rests with human capital; thus there is a need to enhance people’s capacity to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Increased social-ecological resilience will build on enhanced understanding of biophysical and social systems undergoing rapid change and how they are interconnected. Safeguarding continued ecosystem services while supporting socio-economic development is important, and society and government must work with the private sector to build water resilience together.