What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Giving Compass' Take:
• US AID and the Sustainable Water Partnership created this toolkit to guide water security planning to help direct effective and impactful efforts to improve water security.
• How do these recommendations align with your philanthropic goals? Is now the time for you to tackle this issue?
• Learn about the importance of reliable water.
Water Security Is Essential to Life and Humankind, by Supporting:
Public health: Safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) are the most fundamental human needs.
Economic growth: Income generation and poverty alleviation heavily rely on water availability for agriculture, energy production, transportation and other livelihood activities.
Environmental sustainability: Natural ecosystems rely on water; they rapidly deteriorate when deprived of natural flows, directly affecting public health and livelihoods.
Political stability: When basic health and livelihood needs are not met, the strain on populations affects the legitimacy and sustainability of governing authorities and can lead to civil unrest.
Disaster risk reduction: Floods, landslides, droughts, tsunamis, and harmful algal blooms can be catastrophic events that claim lives, affect local economies, and may multiply due to climate variability and change.
Population growth, urbanization, industrialization, rising living standards and Westernized diets are likely to further increase the over-extraction and pollution of water resources. This will raise insecurity and uncertainty over water access and the vulnerability of communities and infrastructure to natural disasters.
This series of toolkits presents an effective and efficient process to address water risks, including long-term water stresses that constrain social and economic development and sudden shocks that can quickly jeopardize the health and livelihoods of vulnerable populations.
Improving water security is about focusing actors and resources on key water risks. It is also about collaboratively planning and implementing specific activities to mitigate risks and provide tangible benefits to water users. Water security activities should combine gray and green infrastructure (including improved operation and maintenance of existing infrastructure), awareness raising and behavior change campaigns, management as well as policy and institutional improvements (such as better data and better informed decision-making).
Improving water security must be a cross-sectoral theme. Development strategies and investments that ignore water security usually fall short of their objectives when water issues and conflicts undermine political and social cohesion, supply and value chains, public and environmental health, and service delivery and infrastructure operation.
Adopting stakeholder participation is vital for successful water security planning. For years, water managers and engineers have used predictive methods to identify solutions and make top-down water management decisions. These technical methods are based on experience and scientific knowledge to predict outcomes based on existing and future conditions. But predictive methods often fail to deliver the expected results due to factors such as the complexity of water issues, the uncertainties around current information and future conditions, and the multiplicity of objectives.