The first three-day meeting of the UN Water Futures and Solutions Scenario Focused Group ended in Paris on November 06, 2013 agreeing on three water scenarios and pathways and a set of strategies and policy options to be further fleshed early next year and finalised in 2015 to help ensure water, food, energy and livelihood securities in a changing global climate, growing population and sluggish economy.
The meeting was held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris and chaired by scenario focused group chair and former vice-president of The World Bank and former water and planning minister of Egypt Dr Ismail Serageldin.
Dr Ismail in his opening statement highlighted the importance of "Water Futures and Solutions" saying the quest for water security has been a struggle throughout human history. Only in recent years has the scale of this quest moved beyond the local, to the national and regional scales and to the entire planet. Absent or unreliable water supply, sanitation and irrigation services, unmitigated floods and droughts, and degraded water environments severely impact half of the planet's population.
Spillovers from these impacts, including supply chain failures, financial shocks, migration and political instability now ripple across our interconnected world, he pointed out. The impacts of rapidly changing economies, populations and climate on fresh water fluxes, on which all terrestrial life depends, are unknown - although it is clear that most of the impacts of climate change on society will be transmitted by water.
David Weiberg outlined the objective of the water assessment, scenarios, and pathways for innovative and creative policy options and solutions. He pointed out that it has recently been recognised that the poorest parts of the world - Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia - are deeply water insecure today in part because they face very high rainfall and runoff variability. Overcoming this variability and complexity requires major investments in water information, institutions and infrastructure. Wealthy countries face much less challenging hydrological conditions, with the few exceptions (such as Australia and the Western USA) having a recent history of massive inward investment of skill and capital. It has also become clear that 'northern' science needs significant refinement for its application to the highly variable and vulnerable hydrological systems of the 'south'.
The World Water Council former President and initiator of this programme Dr William J Cosgrove opined that this hydrological complexity adds significantly to the challenge of sustained economic growth in poor countries, requiring innovative development paths. At the same time, these paths need, to the extent possible, to avoid the high price of ecosystem damage that most wealthy countries have paid on their paths to growth. The need for systemic approach to analyse root causes, alternative development paths and future outcomes is clear.
The overall objective of the Water Futures and Solutions (WFaS) initiative is to develop a set of adaptable, resilient and robust solutions and a framework to facilitate access to and guidance through them by decision makers facing a variety of water-related challenges to sustainable development, and a set of optional pathways to achieve plausible sustainable development goals by 2050.
The WFaS initiative coordinates its work with other on-going efforts for the sake of establishing a consistent set of new global water scenarios, based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) that are being developed in the context of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- 5th Assessment Report (AR5).
The global water scenario assessment framework will initially follow a 'fast-track' mode to produce well-founded yet preliminary scenario estimates. The stakeholders will then broaden and enrich the analysis and assumptions underlying a second round of stakeholder-driven multi-model assessments (to be undertaken in 2014).
The WFaS 'fast-track' analysis extends the SSP storylines with a water dimension and makes use of available results of climate model projections for the four RCPs to develop a set of (preliminary) quantitative water projections. These climate and socio-economic pathways are being analysed in a coordinated multi-model assessment process involving the sector and integrated assessment models, water demand models and different global hydrological models. Integration and synthesis of results will produce a first set of quantified global water scenarios that include consistency in climate, socio-economic developments (in e.g., population, economic, energy) and water resources.
The scenario group extends the SSPs with relevant critical dimensions of the main water use sectors for the development of a first set of assumptions applied in global water models. This is achieved for different conditions in terms of a country or regions ability to cope with water-related risks and its exposure to complex hydrological conditions. For this purpose, a classification of hydro-economic challenges in each country has been developed. Critical water dimensions have been assessed qualitatively and quantitatively for each SSP and Hydro-Economic class.
The longer term goal is to develop comprehensive water scenarios that will provide a basis for identifying solution options that can be implemented as part of national and international policies and strategies tackling water challenges.
GLOBAL WATER MODELS: The WFaS 'fast-track' assessment uses three global water models, which include both water supply and demand, namely WaterGAP3, H08 and PCR-GLOBWB.
Scenario planning, also called scenario thinking or scenario analysis, is a strategic planning method that some organisations use to make flexible long-term plans. Scenarios enable improved decision-making. Insightful analysis, structural thinking and challenging outlooks are central elements to good scenarios. These, in turn, allow for more objective and robust responses to current and future needs.
Philippe van Notten (Notten, P. van, 2006) defines scenarios as: consistent and coherent descriptions of alternative hypothetical futures that reflect different perspectives on past, present, and future developments, which can serve as a basis for action.
Decision makers can use scenarios to think about the uncertain aspects of the future that worry them most - or to discover the aspects about which they should be concerned - and to explore ways in which these might unfold. Because there is no single answer to such enquires, scenario builders create sets of scenarios. These scenarios all address the same important questions and all include those aspects of the future that are likely to persist, but each one describes a different way in which the uncertain aspects could play out.
Good scenarios are ones that explore the possible, not just the probable - providing a relevant challenge to the conventional wisdom of their users, and helping them prepare for the major changes ahead. They will provide a useful context for debate, leading to better policy and strategy, and a shared understanding of, and commitment to actions.
The purpose and goals of the scenario focus group (sfg) meeting were:
l Establishment of the SFG and understanding of the goals of the initiative and SFG process.
l Gaining mutual understanding of the primary water resource development and use concerns and priorities of the different regions.
l Reviewing and improvement of water scenarios, possible futures that members of the SFG would like to see investigated and assessed.
l Ensuring project impact, usefulness and relevance as well as usability of its outputs.
SHARED SOCIO-ECONOMIC PATHWAYS: The Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) completed in 2012 (van Vuuren et.al, 2011) provide input that is essential for climate modelers. The spatial and seasonal patterns of future climate change estimated by climate models2 must be complemented by socioeconomic and ecological data that the other climate change research groups, namely the integrated assessment modelers (IAM), and the impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability community (IAV), need. In response to this, the climate change research community converged on new projections, termed Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs).
The SSPs include both a qualitative component in the form of a narrative on global development and a quantitative component that includes numerical pathways for certain variables that are particularly useful to have in quantitative form for use in other studies (Arnell et al., 2011). Narratives were developed and agreed upon for basic versions of five SSPs, illustrated within the space of socio-economic challenges to mitigation and adaptation outcomes that the SSPs are intended to span (Arnell et al., 2011). Each narrative includes a Summary and a full version. The key characteristics of each storyline are also illustrated. There are five Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSPs) (Source: O'Neill, 2012)
Each of SSP "elements" was identified to describe a set of variables, processes or components of human-environment systems that provide the building blocks for constructing both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of SSPs. Key elements of an SSP characterise the global socio-economic future of the 21st century as a reference for climate change analysis. They include demography, economic development, human development, technology, lifestyles, environment and natural resources, policy and institutions. For a subset of SSP elements an associated table of qualitative assumptions for all SSPs about direction and magnitude of trends in SSP elements were developed (Annex II in O'Neill, 2012).
The SSPs were developed by the climate change community with a focus on the key elements for climate policy analysis. The aim in this paper is to extend the SSP storylines with a water dimension and develop "water extended SSP storylines". The SSP element list in O'Neill (2012) includes one aspect of water resources in the key element group 'environment and natural resources', specifically 'water availability'. However, no water aspect has been included.
However, Indian Planning Commission member Dr Mihir Shah and this writer challenged some of the underlying assumptions of the models and pathways and argued that those were heavily biased towards glorification of globalisation instead of recognising developing countries national context, private sector and profit rather than public sector, market rather than non-market, Northern values ignoring Southern values and cultures.
The decades-old Washington Consensus is no more applied in the context of the many a developing countries like Bangladesh, India, Egypt, South Africa, Nepal, Bhutan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Mozambique, Sudan, Brazil, Argentina. International cooperation, regional and sub-regional cooperation are of paramount importance in resolving transboundary water issues, flow augmentation and dispute resolution to ensure water, food, energy and livelihood securities especially in the climate vulnerable countries like LDCs including Bangladesh.
The writer is a member of the UN Water Scenario Focused Group, a member of UN Climate Adaptation Committee, a Lead Climate Negotiator of LDCs, chairman of FEJB and APFEJ.
quamrul2030@gmail.com
Sustainable water futures versus Washington Consensus
Quamrul Islam Chowdhury | Published: November 09, 2013 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2025 06:01:00
Share if you like