How Can we Build Climate Resilience in Water Management?
In 2024, climate records were broken, leading to what felt like a seemingly endless string of disasters across the globe. Global temperatures reached an all-time high of 1.2°C above the 1995-2005 average. More than half the world’s population, spread across 111 countries, experienced their warmest year yet. Both high rainfall and drought are becoming more common and extreme. But there are still numerous actions people and their governments can take to be better prepared for the water-related risks that result from a warming world.
Last year, water-related disasters such as flash floods, landslides and tropical cyclones caused over 8,700 deaths, displaced 40 million people and racked up more than $550 billion in damages. This is indicative of what we can expect for a future with an intensified global hydrological cycle. With global warming of 2-4°C, the number of people facing physical water scarcity could be between three and four billion.
Water security for all is affected by climate change, which acts in concert with land use changes and important demographic and economic changes. Water demand is growing due to (urban) population increases, economic growth and associated higher demand for water-intensive products. The agricultural sector uses the most water, challenged by the “need to feed” and to optimize water and land use. Drivers of reduced availability at critical times and places include the deterioration of water quality by wastewater discharged into waterways without treatment, ecosystem degradation and climate change, with the increasingly variable patterns of rainfall, warming and loss of glaciers. All these ingredients of crises (as well as ways to avoid it) were summarized by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water in their comprehensive 2024 report.
In 2025, water practitioners around the globe will reflect on the profound impact climate change has on people through water. The UN World Water Day theme is “Glacier Preservation,” while the UN World Water Development Report 2025 will focus on mountains and glaciers as water towers. Additionally, this year’s World Water Week in Stockholm — a key forum for dialogue between practitioners and policymakers in the global water sector — will center on the theme “Water for Climate Action.”
Often, climate change and its cascading impacts appear to be too big to handle, beyond control. But there are solutions that can help people and governments be better prepared for water-related risks. What are those solutions? Water is a key area of Helvetas work. Below, we take a deep dive into how we and our partners are addressing current and future water security challenges.
Existing strategies to adapt and build climate resilience in water
Helvetas seeks to make people, especially those traditionally left behind, more water and food secure, and to set them on a pathway to climate and disaster resilience and sustainably managed natural resources. In our water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and water governance work, we support public, civic and private actors in enhancing capacities needed to contribute to sustainable, resilient and equitable WASH and irrigation services, as well as to practice integrated water resources management.
Ensuring climate and disaster resilience in water management and water-related services is key for sustainable development. But how can we bring it into practice?
Three basic strategies exist to meet water needs as climate variability and the frequency of extremes rise:
- Ensure equity in supply and efficiency in demand: Ensure that water is supplied to all users when needed, in the amounts needed and at the quality needed, with the definition of “need” incorporating efficiency and use considerations.
- Increase water storage, from soil to watershed, with the aim to buffer fluctuations in water availability.
- Reduce water-related risks by avoiding damage to livelihoods, infrastructure and the environment as hydrologic systems fluctuate.
Climate change is already impacting the water sector, which is still far from having its house in order, particularly in relation to the Sustainable Development Goal 6 targets. Addressing water-related risks often requires tackling these “old” issues first — or at least simultaneously — across three interconnected levels:
- Integrated water resources management principles and water governance structures to decide on who gets what water, when and how, should be in place and work for the interests of the poorest and most vulnerable stakeholders.
- Institutions need to gather data, be risk-informed, prepared and capable to plan ahead and invest in resilient systems and resource management.
- People need to be empowered to act through information, knowledge, assets, practices and voice in decision making on access and management.
Strategy 1: Ensuring equity in water supply and efficiency in demand
In a water-scarce context, the priority is ensuring the human right to water and sanitation for all, especially those who have no access to safe water. All people have a right to a minimum amount of water to cover their most basic needs. As long as universal coverage remains unmet, planning and investment in projects that expand service access — and, by extension, water use — stays imperative.
An assessment of climate resilience of community-level water and sanitation systems done in the frame of Helvetas’ WASH Resiliente project in northern Mozambique showed that rural coastal communities do not have even basic access to sanitation and hygiene. Climate change in the shape of more frequent intense rainfall and flooding is a complicating factor on top of this pre-existing inequity.
Yet there are many systems and sectors in which water demand can be better managed, reducing water waste (and associated energy waste). Examples of curbing water demand are reducing water losses in use systems (by fixing leakages, changing irrigation methods and ensuring maintenance); shifting zones, timing, patterns and crop varieties towards lower water demand and/or greater drought tolerance; the re-use of water; and measuring and valuing water use, also economically. Perhaps the most evident action is to avoid water pollution and treat wastewater, thereby maintaining water quality for downstream and future uses. Especially in dry areas, overuse of water should be addressed through awareness raising, monitoring of use and practices, and technologies that fit the context.
In the National Water Resources Management project in Tajikistan, improvements in water use efficiency in irrigated agriculture are promoted. Tajikistan’s water security suffers from glacier melting that will ultimately lead to reduced low season flows. Water losses were reduced at the farmer and Water User Association levels through awareness-raising, the adoption of improved practices and technologies at the plot level, and the rehabilitation of irrigation systems.
Another example of reducing water demand comes from the highlands of Peru. Under the Agua para Abancay y Comunidades, para siempre project, Helvetas has supported the water utility to understand the urban water demand within the water available at watershed level, to monitor and control unbilled water, and to identify ways to motivate city dwellers to reduce water waste and allow cover of the city’s growing population.
Reducing water losses typically enables those with existing access to water, to expand their irrigated areas, without necessarily transferring the conserved water to other uses or users. In general, reallocating water from those who use too much to those who do not have enough or to another use sector altogether does not happen spontaneously. This reallocation requires water managers to measure actual use and change practices and incentives across multiple users with competing interests. This is a task of growing importance.
Strategy 2: Increasing water storage
Climate change increases the variability of rainfall patterns in time and space, making water availability more unpredictable for water users and worrying farmers. Increased water storage is often an important adaptation strategy, with the aim to buffer fluctuations in water availability when rainfall patterns become more variable across the seasons.
Variations can be buffered at different scales, from plot to watershed: Water needs to infiltrate where it falls, and runoff needs to be slowed down as much as possible in a watershed to reduce water flow during intense events and water’s erosive power. Water managers need to analyze the water cycle at the watershed level. Possible actions to increase storage capacity include soil conservation, fertility and moisture management practices, building terraces and stone walls, and ensuring vegetation cover through reforestation, conservation and restoration. Water storage can be done in and through natural systems (e.g., wetland and natural pond management, managed aquifer recharge) and in built systems (e.g., reservoirs and their operation, small-scale rainwater harvesting systems at the household or plot level).
Helvetas supports conserving and restoring ecosystems from a landscape and watershed perspective. Conserving, restoring and sustainably using ecosystems and biodiversity are fundamental to sustainable development and enhancing climate and disaster resilience. This should be done in combination with structural measures such as surface storage to overcome sudden dry spells in the rainy season and improve water infiltration to feed mountain springs (e.g., as seen in the rainwater harvesting practices across the highlands of Peru). A closer look needs to be taken at groundwater resources, their degree of sustainability in use, and the adaptations needed for its management — also with a view to its long-term buffer function in the face of climate variability and glacier loss. This is a key component of the Groundwater Management project in Tajikistan.
Strategy 3: Reducing water-related risks for people and infrastructure
Climate change brings higher risks of floods and droughts, which lead to interrupted services and damage or loss of water infrastructure and livelihoods. To reduce these risks, our most important ally is the natural environment and working with and through nature-based solutions for water-related risks. This strategy includes preventive measures such as hazard, vulnerability and risk awareness and mapping, territorial planning, adjusting design criteria for water systems, and building housing and drainage on high ground. It also includes preparedness measures such as physical or vegetative riverbank protection, monitoring and early warning systems.
At Helvetas, we aim to consider climate risks and adaptation measures structurally in our WASH and water governance projects in both rural and urban areas. Our programs include awareness building, vulnerability and risk assessments, and the promotion of concrete measures that people can take to reduce risks and build resilience.
The Increasing Access to Improved WASH Services project in Bangladesh shows how this can be done. In Bangladesh, people are faced with high levels of salinity in groundwater, soil and drinking water due to sea level rise, saline intrusion and increased flooding. The project promoted pond sand filter systems with solar powered pumps and rainwater harvesting for safe drinking water. It is key that past investments in water and sanitation and agricultural development are not washed away.
What if water use adds to the problem of global warming?
Though climate change is affecting water availability, which demands adaptive measures, the energy use in the sector also contributes to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., though fossil fueled pumping of water for irrigation or water supply systems). Plus, mitigation efforts such as large-scale reforestation for carbon capture can evaporate scarce surface water. Coherency and tradeoffs must be considered between water use, emissions and carbon storage. The water sector’s contribution to emissions will be further discussed this August at World Water Week in Stockholm, when water-climate linkages are scrutinized in an effort for all in the sector to know more and do better.
In WASH projects where pumping is needed, Helvetas increasingly includes solar-powered pumps, as in Mali, Benin and Madagascar. This year we’ll also be exploring financing WASH investments from carbon finance in Madagascar and Mozambique. Any additional investments from climate commitments directed toward WASH services and water management should be used to address both longstanding challenges and build resilience through these investments. We cannot afford to not consider this.
Principles to follow for a water-secure future
To address water availability, quality and equity, principles of integrated water resources management need to be put into practice. This has proven to be a tough and slow but fundamental process that is needed as the basis for climate-resilient development.
Increasing access to climate-resilient WASH services demands strengthening the institutional, technical, organizational and financial capacities of the institutions that are responsible for service delivery, from the local to the national level.
We need to build awareness and understanding around how climate change affects water users, their water supply systems, livelihoods and the water resource management they depend on. Through this, actions can be identified and promoted at scale that make water access endure over time, bringing greater water and food security for all.
