Adaptation of water resources management to climate change

PrefaceThis report will help water professionals to identify actions that can be taken to adapt to thechanges in the world's water regimes expected to occur over the coming decades. It’s origins canbe traced back to the World Water Vision, a declaration on global water issues adopted in March2000 during the Second World Water Forum. The Vision highlighted climate change as one of themajor challenges facing water professionals over the next twenty-five years.The World Water Vision coincided with a growing awareness within the United Nations FrameworkConvention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on the need to adapt to climate change. Changes to theclimate are already leading to more unstable and shifting water regimes around the world. Thelimited reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that are agreed upon in international negotiationswill be inadequate to mitigate their effects. It is becoming apparent that if we cannot preventthe problem, we must adapt to it.IUCN's work on the linkage between water and wetland resources and climate change stems fromits engagement in the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. As a long-standing partner of thatConvention, IUCN provided technical advice to Parties when they adopted their first resolutionon climate change at their seventh Conference of Contracting Parties in 1999. More recently, IUCNprepared the Wetlands and Climate Change report, which provided an analysis of the linkagesbetween the Ramsar Convention and the UNFCCC.Further work conducted by IUCN in partnership with others has unveiled more and more evidenceof increasingly unstable and shifting water regimes around the world. Water professionals in mostcountries are confronted with greater variability in the amount and seasonality of rainfall andstream flows, as well as the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme hydrological events.Their concern is that this variability will increase with a warming world, and place ever increasingchallenges on conventional water practices and policies.This book encourages water professionals to continue with, and to strengthen, the changes theyare already beginning to make. Climate change reinforces the new style of management that isemerging within the water sector in response to rising demands for water resources. Such amanagement style moves beyond technical quick fixes to engage with various societal groups ina process to deal with emerging risks and uncertainties. The new management style includes allstakeholders, relies on the capacities of people, encourages joint learning, and invests in managingconflicts.IUCN looks forward to working with water professionals and other partners in catalysing a societywideprocess for addressing one of the most pressing environmental issues of our time. Only bythinking, working and learning together can we tackle the impacts on water resources and theuncertainties induced by climate change.Achim SteinerDirector GeneralIUCN-The World Conservation Unionix