The WaCCliM has demonstrated that water and wastewater emissions are relevant to reaching net zero emissions and can contribute significantly to methane reductions. To leverage the sector’s mitigation potential, water and wastewater emissions should be considered in national GHG inventories. The Global Methane Pledge, in particular, can only succeed if solutions for low GHG wastewater management are scaled up.
IWA Search Theme: Climate Resilience
Beyond economic incentives: enabling mitigation action in the water sector
This policy brief shows that considering exclusively economic incentives for mitigation measures in utilities is not enough. The development of an enabling environment for mitigation in the water sector is crucial. This includes (1) climate commitments as a driver for sectoral mitigation action, (2) policy/regulation mechanisms for mitigation in the water sector, (3) access to climate-sensitive infrastructure finance, and (4) the development of capacities in utilities. The policy brief closes with recommendations for policy makers and financing institutions as well as actors who cooperate with them in the framework of international cooperation.
Guía de Apoyo para el Desarrollo de Planes de Gestión de Riesgos Climáticos para Organismos Operadores de Agua y Saneamiento en México
Water in a changing climate: Reducing risks, leveraging opportunities and enhancing resilience
Resilience is a journey, not a destination. As the climate has changed, so too have the approaches needed to understand and proactively address associated risks and opportunities. Utilities, governments and corporations across all sectors are realizing that looking to the past is no longer sufficient to plan for our future in a changing climate.
Adaptation Gap Report 2021
Even as the world looks to step up efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the need to adapt to the impacts of climate change already locked in are just as important. The sixth edition of the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report: The Gathering Storm looks at how the world is doing in adapting to these intensifying impacts.
Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report assesses the impacts of climate change, looking at ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels. It also reviews vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of the natural world and human societies to adapt to climate change.
ENABLING PRIVATE INVESTMENT IN CLIMATE ADAPTATION & RESILIENCE
This report identifies ways to overcome key barriers to private sector investment in adaptation and resilience, laying out a coordinated and data-driven Blueprint for Action to help governments and their development partners to close the adaptation finance gap. Although climate adaptation finance flows have increased by 35% in recent years, they still fall short of what is needed to avoid severe economic and human impacts from climate change. The urgent need for boosting investment in climate adaptation and resilience cannot be overstated. The blueprint provides five entry points to enable private investment. The Blueprint for action we propose in the report represents a novel coordinated framework for action for governments to develop, finance, and implement priority adaptation and resilience investments – driven by countries’ goals and national investment plans that can help accelerate and scale up investment to address the climate resilience needs of the world’s most climate-vulnerable communities and economies.
Anticipated maximum scale precipitation for calculating the worst-case floods
Building the Resilience of WSS Utilities to Climate Change and Other Threats : A Road Map
Water supply and sanitation (WSS) utilities are expected to become increasingly susceptible to the expected impacts of climate change. WSS utility planners and engineers have dealt with natural climate variances and disaster planning as part of the design process for many years. However, the traditional methods for these plans have not considered the deep uncertainty surrounding many future conditions, which are further exacerbated by climate change. To help utilities incorporate resilience and robustness in their choices, this road map proposes a process in three phases that can inform the design of strategies necessary to WSS services provision. The road map builds on the understanding that climate change is most often an amplifier of existing uncertainties (many of which are threats), and, as such, should not be evaluated as a stand-alone impact. The approach reveals the strengths and vulnerabilities of investment plans concisely and helps utilities invest robustly by identifying near-term, no-regret projects that can be undertaken now, while maintaining flexibility in pursuing additional actions adaptively as future conditions evolve. These results can be achieved both with a qualitative exploration and a quantitative assessment, depending on the context and the resources available.
Resilient Water Infrastructure Design Brief
The purpose of the Resilient Water Infrastructure Design Brief is to guide users on how resilience can be built into the engineering design of their project. With a focus on the three natural hazards most likely to affect water and sanitation infrastructure (droughts, floods, and high winds from storms), the document provides a six-step process to help users address weather and climate related challenges that are most likely to affect an infrastructure component at some point in its operational lifetime. In order to achieve both systems level resilience and infrastructure level resilience, this design brief should be used in tandem with other World Bank publications, such as the 2018 guidance document “Building the Resilience of WSS Utilities to Climate Change and Other Threats: A Road Map,” which emphasizes systems level resilience and analysis. The design brief highlights the relationship between these two documents and the unique function that each serves in improving overall resilience in the water sector. It also includes guidance for users to incorporate resilience design principles into projects’ appraisal documents and a sample module/task description for applying the two documents to an engineering design or feasibility study terms of reference.