scholarly journals Lessons learned for improving policies affecting forest conservation and climate change adaptation in Uganda's water tower communities

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell A. ◽  
Banana A.Y. ◽  
Ongugo P.
Water Policy ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1014-1029 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jos Timmerman ◽  
John Matthews ◽  
Sonja Koeppel ◽  
Daniel Valensuela ◽  
Niels Vlaanderen

Abstract Climate change adaptation in water management is a water governance issue. While neither climate change nor water respects national borders, adaptation in water management should be treated as a transboundary water governance issue. However, transboundary water management is, in essence, more complex than national water management because the water management regimes usually differ more between countries than within countries. This paper provides 63 lessons learned from almost a decade of cooperation on transboundary climate adaptation in water management under the UNECE Water Convention and puts these into the context of the OECD principles on water governance. It highlights that good water governance entails a variety of activities that are intertwined and cannot be considered stand-alone elements. The paper also shows that this wide variety of actions is needed to develop a climate change adaptation strategy in water management. Each of the lessons learned can be considered concrete actions connected to one or more of the OECD principles, where a range of actions may be needed to fulfil one principle. The paper concludes that developing climate change adaptation measures needs to improve in parallel the water governance system at transboundary scale.


Abstract Several papers have through the years criticized climate policy decision making for being naïve with respect to how they view climate model outputs as objective facts and use the outputs directly to program policies. From this and similar observations, many of the papers conclude that there is a need for shifting to a new approach on how climate policymakers may relate to climate change uncertainties. The article proposes such a shift by presenting a roadmap on how to address uncertainties in climate change adaptation. It consists of three major elements: Firstly, to accept that in many cases we will not be able to reduce climate change uncertainties. Secondly, to diversify the way in which we describe climate change uncertainties, moving from a one-dimensional technical perspective to a multi-dimensional perspective which applies uncertainties also to social and political processes and systems. Thirdly, to change the way we address climate change uncertainties by moving from a predict-then-act to a reflect-then-act approach, implying that we must adapt to climate change even under high and various forms of uncertainties. Embedded in this last point is to accept unlike that of climate change mitigation, the precautionary principle will apply in many situations of climate change adaptation. In the last part of the article the usability of the proposed roadmap is demonstrated post-ante on four Norwegian cases of climate related natural hazard events.


Waterlines ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-114
Author(s):  
Tallulah Gordon ◽  
Andrés Hueso

The links between climate change and sanitation are frequently overlooked in the WASH sector. This paper examines experiences of WaterAid in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, India, and Madagascar where there was some consideration of the impacts of climate change on sanitation. Climate resilience was often not considered explicitly, however, with work instead framed around weather-related threats that are now increasingly frequent and severe. In these case studies, sanitation and climate integration involved adapting on-site sanitation hardware to physical impacts on infrastructure, while some social aspects of climate resilience were also considered. Integration took place primarily at the project level, while climate change consideration seemed absent from wider planning and decision-making. Aside from these case studies, most of WaterAid’s sanitation work does not seem to incorporate climate change. It is recommended that climate resilience is integrated into each stage of sanitation programming, with a more systematic consideration of its potential impacts.


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