25 September 2019: The Global Water Partnership (GWP) has released 10 success stories from its Water, Climate and Development Programme (WACDEP). The programme, which launched in 2011, equips countries, partner organizations and local communities to address the impacts of climate change on water availability and water quality. The 10 stories demonstrate positive outcomes from WACDEP for small-scale agriculture (SDG 2), health (SDG 3), and water and sanitation access (SDG 6), among many other benefits.

WACDEP was designed in response to a request from the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW) for GWP to support the African Union (AU) agenda on water and sanitation. The program sought to integrate water and climate adaptation into development planning and investments. WACDEP worked in cooperation with the GWP’s Integrated Drought Management Program (IDMP), which was implemented jointly with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Overall, the programme has facilitated the incorporation of water and climate considerations into 20 formally approved national, regional, and river basin plans and strategies, influenced more than 15 investment plans with support for infrastructure financing of more than 1 billion Euro, and conducted more than 30 demonstration projects. The program also mobilized more than 25 million Euro for water and climate resilience projects.

The report titled, ’10 Stories of Impact’, draws attention to the effects of climate change as experienced through floods, droughts, rainfall, and variability in the water cycle. The stories cover a wide variety of actions, including community-based flood management in Thailand, water storage technology in Central America, fluoride in groundwater in Cameroon, and a water resources investment strategy for transboundary projects in the Orange-Senqu River Basin.

The ’10 Stories of Impact’ report was released during the Climate Action Summit in New York, US, in September 2019. GWP will launch a detailed program report on WACDEP at the 25th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 25) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Santiago, Chile, in 2019. [GWP Press Release]