posted on 2024-10-04, 13:42authored byShilpi Srivastava, Lyla Mehta, Lars Otto Naess
There is growing awareness that water is
central to climate change adaptation.
Water is a top adaptation priority
in 79% of the Nationally Determined
Contributions
. However, there are several
challenges in translating these commitments
to substantive benefits on the ground,
in particular for poor and marginalized
populations. According to the recent World
Health Organization and United Nations
Children’s Fund report
, more than 2 billion
people still lack access to safe drinking
water, with huge disparities across and
within countries. Climate change will only
intensify these challenges and disparities
as the availability of water becomes more
uncertain and irregular. Still, planned
interventions are often narrowly framed
around either too little water (scarcity) or
too much water (floods) with ‘solutions’
that predominantly focus on top-down,
capital-intensive infrastructure development
or market-based solutions for optimizing
water-use efficiency. These perspectives tend
to overlook the multifaceted nature of water,
which has biophysical, socio-political and
cultural dimensions, and is highly variable
across time and space.
Funding
Default funder
History
Publisher
Springer Nature Ltd.
Citation
Srivastava, S.; Mehta, L. and Naess, L.O. (2022) 'Increased Attention to Water is Key to Adaptation', Nat. Clim. Chang. (2022) DOI: 10.1038/s41558-022-01277-w