
Summary
In the Water Solutions webinars, we take a deep dive into the four subthemes for the Amsterdam International Water Week in November. Together with scientist, innovators, and experts from cities, utilities, industry and agriculture we bring new perspectives and insights to the table. This fourth webinar focus on Community Engagement and Inter-sectoral Collaboration.
Main Question
How do we enable inclusive decision-making and ensure robust and integrated blue-green solutions?
Introduction
Threading through all the other three sub-themes, requires continuous community and stakeholder engagement at all decision levels. Building awareness, capacity strengthening and inclusion of data-driven and innovative solutions can help build trust among the stakeholders, communities, organizations and youth organizations. Future climate risks, degrading environment and natural processes require a collaborative and integrated approach. Consumer centric infrastructural and systemic solutions for example in water pricing and tariff settings can be a step forward to begin with. Inclusive decision-making processes and management can be a step forward in bridging the gap between decisions and implementations, policy makers and communities and expected outcomes vis-à-vis actual results.
Water distribution systems especially in times of drought, trade-offs between competing sectors and political priorities often lead to water supply and access issues. Water re-allocation mechanisms triggered by stakeholder-led decision processes can provide a common-ground for building trust as well as building robust and flexible integrated solutions. Water Pricing and Smart data tools for data-led planning and strategies can provide the necessary trigger in fostering collaboration between sectors and at multi-levels.
The webinar will take place in 3 parts. The first part will focus on deepening the sub-thematic understanding, asking the main questions and Inter-sectoral collaboration as an enabler. The second part will focus on Learning through Good practices and the third part is about discussing and connecting the global institutions for an active dialogue on perspectives, climate emergency and global needs ahead of SDG Agenda 2030.