World Water Assessment Programme
The United Nations World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) hosted and led by UNESCO, is a Programme Office on Global Water Assessment. It was founded in 2000 in response to a call from the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) to produce a UN system-wide periodic global overview of the status (quantity and quality), use and management of freshwater resources. To meet this challenge, WWAP coordinates the work of 31 UN-Water members, and 38 international partners under the umbrella mechanism of UN-Water, in the production of the World Water Development Report (WWDR). The WWDR is the UN flagship report on water issues; it is a comprehensive review that gives an overall picture of the state, use and management of the world’s freshwater resources and aims to provide decision-makers with tools to formulate and implement sustainable water policies. The WWDR is released every year with a different focus on different strategic water issues, and it is a comprehensive review that gives an overall picture of the state of freshwater resources around the world, with the aim of providing managers and key decisions-makers with the information, data, tools and skills necessary to enable them to effectively participate in the development of policies. Consequently, WWAP aims to equip water managers and policy- and decision-makers with knowledge, tools and skills necessary to formulate and implement sustainable water policies.
Background
The growing global water crisis threatens the security, stability and environmental sustainability of developing but also developed nations. Millions die each year from water-borne diseases, while water pollution and ecosystem destruction aggravate, particularly in the developing world. Over the past few decades there has been an increasing acceptance that the management of water resources must be undertaken with an integrated approach, that assessment of the resource is of fundamental importance as the basis for decision-making and that national capacities to undertake necessary assessments must be fully supported. Management decisions to alleviate poverty, to allow economic development, to ensure food security and the health of human populations as well as preserve vital ecosystems, must be based on our best possible understanding of all relevant systems. In 1998, the Sixth Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development stated that there was a need for regular, global assessments on the status of freshwater resources. In response to this recommendation, the member organizations of UN-Water (known then as the ACC Subcommittee on Water Resources) decided to undertake a collective UN system-wide continuing assessment process. Founded in 2000, the World Water Assessment Programme coordinates the production of the UN World Water Development Report (WWDR), to report on the status of global freshwater resources Initially the periodicity and coverage of the Report was triennial and comprehensive, but in 2012, UN-Water changed this for it to have an annual periodicity and being theme oriented with as purpose to sharpen the focus of the Report on strategic water issues and become more topical. Recent and future key themes addressed by the WWDRs are:
- Water and energy nexus (WWDR 2014);
- Water and the dimensions of sustainable development (WWDR 2015);
- Water and jobs, (youth) unemployment, green growth (WWDR 2016);
- Wastewater management, circular economy (WWDR 2017);
- Nature-based solutions for water, including ecosystems protection, green/grey infrastructures and traditional knowledge (WWDR 2018);
- Leaving no one behind, including migration, gender equality, hydro-politics, livelihoods, vulnerable groups (WWDR 2019); and
- Water and climate, resilience and adaptation (WWDR 2020).
Mission and Objectives
This UNESCO programme aims to equip water managers and policy- and decision-makers with knowledge, tools and skills necessary to formulate and implement sustainable water policies. The Programme's objectives are to:
- Monitor, assess and report on the world's freshwater resources and ecosystems, water use and management, and identify critical issues and problems;
- Help countries develop their own assessment capacity;
- Raise awareness on current and imminent/future water related challenges to influence the global water agenda;
- Inform and respond to the needs of decision-makers and water resource managers;
- Support anticipatory decision-making on the global water system including the identification of alternative futures;
- Promote gender equality;
- Measure progress towards achieving sustainable use of water resources through robust indicators and;
- Identify the progress made globally as well as by specific regions in the realization of international commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Activities
The United Nations World Water Development Report
To face the challenge of providing a global water assessment, WWAP produces the World Water Development Report, the UN flagship report on water issues, released every year, to give an overall picture of the state of water resources. Through a series of assessments the Report provide a mechanism for monitoring changes in the resource and its management and tracking progress towards achieving different targets.
The basis for the Report springs from the UN Millenium Declaration of 2000, where the international community pledged to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people who are unable to reach, afford safe drinking water and to stop the unsustainable exploitation of water resources by developing water management strategies at local, regional and global level. In 2015, many countries adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDG): a large part of them is dependent upon the access to safe and sufficient water. As such, the World Water Development Report is part of an ongoing worldwide assessment project that is taking stock of past actions, present challenges and future opportunities in order to provide the information needed for efficient and effective capacity-building throughout the world. For this reason, the WWDR is targeted to all those involved in the formulation and implementation of water-related policies and investment strategies, as well as to professionals at all levels.
One of the key objectives of the World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) is to help countries improve their self-assessment capability by building on existing strengths and experiences. WWAP fulfils this mission by assisting in the preparation of case studies in countries around the world in order to highlight the state of water resources where different physical, climatic and socio-economic conditions prevail. In this regard, case studies show the diversity of circumstances and different human needs. The second purpose of the case studies is to highlight the challenges that need to be addressed in the water resources sector. In the process, the skills and experience of both local water professionals and policy-makers are engaged and enhanced. The World Water Assessment Programme is both global and local in scale, for it must check the accuracy of the big picture on the basis of snapshots of water in the field. In the global strategy to improve the overall quality of water resources, local actions often present the starting point the most fruitful efforts. The WWAP case studies aim to provide a snapshot of those efforts while showing the significance of the decisions taken at local, sub-national and national levels. The lessons learned, from both successes and failures, may be shared with other countries interested in addressing such issues.
The SDG 6 Synthesis Report aims to provide an overview of the status of SDG 6 implementation at the global and regional levels, as well as some comprehensive information about how SDG 6 is interlinked to other SDG targets and indicators of the Agenda 2030 and the overall sustainability challenges that nations around the world are faced with. By summarizing the progress towards the achievement of SDG 6, this report will provide Member States with the ‘big picture’ on water and sanitation issues, outlining ways to accelerate progress towards this goal. Lessons learned and win-win solutions by which more than one SDG is benefited from SDG 6-related actions, as well as trade-offs and the potential implication of policies adopted by countries will be highlighted. This will enable countries to develop a roadmap towards a more sustainable development, for which water is critical in many regards. The World Water Assessment Programme coordinates a Task Force to Produce the SDG 6 Synthesis Report 2018, composed by some UN-Water members, such as CEO Water Mandate, FAO, ILO, UN-Habitat, UN-Water Technical Advisory Unit (TAU), UNDP, UNECE, UNEP, UNESCO, UNICEF, UNU, WHO, WMO and World Bank.
Starting from the challenges of the WWDR, WWAP also focuses on Capacity Development, providing training and courses, such as the “Capacity Development Training Programme on Water and Sustainable Development” to supply tools to strengthen institutional capacity and the effectiveness of water (and water-related) governmental agencies and enhance countries’ capacity to deal with often complex water issues. The training modules focus on issues pertaining the realization of SDG 6 on Water and Sanitation, such as Data and Information regarding water management, the 'Water – Food – Energy and Environment nexus', adapting to extreme water-related events, integrated water resources management, and planning sustainable urban water infrastructure.
In 2014 WWAP has started a ground-breaking project on gender-sensitive water assessment, monitoring and reporting, with a goal to demonstrate how water is a gendered issue. Although women play a key role in the provision, management and safeguarding on water, gender inequality persist on the globe. The Advisor Group on Gender Equality founded in 2010, developed a series of indicators for the collection of sex-disaggregated water data, which are contained/included in the “Toolkits”, with the aim of addressing the considerable data gap on gender and water issues at the global level. The project developed a methodology using the indicators with the aim of advocating for the implementation of gender-sensitive water monitoring in the post-2015 agenda and, in particular, in the monitoring framework of the SDGs.