Water
The urgent need to address complex and growing water challenges calls for a robust, interdisciplinary approach. The Water Program uses scenarios to explore how different water management policies may affect development in the face of the increasing uncertainty of water challenges. The program provides data, methods, and tools that are consistent across sectors and scales. Together, these drive real improvements in global water security.
Objectives
- Explore new water scenarios and solutions, based on cutting-edge global and regional modeling, seeking breakthroughs not only in understanding problems but also in developing solutions.
- Enhance knowledge sharing through the development of online databases, decision support tools, and online platforms to help communicate and visualize trade-offs and synergies among options.
- Develop an integrated nexus approach combining multi-model analysis across sectors and socioeconomic variables, including governance.
- Provide the analytical backbone for a comprehensive report on global water futures and solutions.
- Foster a multi-stakeholder scientific initiative to define water challenges and identify solution options across sectors at multiple scales by holding stakeholder and donor workshops.
- Establish a knowledge hub for science and policy by developing, maintaining, and harmonizing databases on water-related issues.
Top image © Giles Paire | Shutterstock
Selected highlights
Exploring sustainable biofuel feedstock potential in Sub-Saharan Africa
The Worldwide Fund for Nature South Africa (WWF-SA) has commissioned IIASA to assess pathways towards large-scale, sustainable aviation biofuel deployment in Sub-Saharan Africa, and to address the complex interlinkages in different dimensions of the...
Finding the perfect balance
In many basins across the globe, increasing competition for water resources that serve multiple users in a variety of sectors, along with uncertain climatic conditions, are forcing decision makers to rethink the way in which multipurpose water storage facilities are...
Asia’s looming water crisis
Climate and socioeconomic change is expected to contribute to water stress in Asia, which means that between 1.6 and 2 billion people could potentially experience severe water stress conditions by 2050. By applying water use scenarios developed by the Water Futures...
Informing sustainable water management options
Pressure on the world’s water resources has been mounting substantially in recent decades, and is expected to be further exacerbated by climatic and socioeconomic changes in the future. The Extended Continental-scale Hydro-economic Optimization Model (ECHO) developed...