Integrated Water Resources Management: A Backbone for Building Climate Resilience

Since water flows across administrative and national boundaries, managing water resources is most effective when it aligns with river basin boundaries. Integrated Water Resources Management can provide a backbone not only to manage water across sectors, but also to underpin climate action, reduce disasters and build communities’ resilience. Articulating sustainable change simultaneously at the basin and sub-basin levels while demonstrating rapid benefits for people’s livelihoods is a huge challenge, but an ever-growing necessity in the face of climate change.

Based on the Dublin principles set in 1992, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) is a process promoting the coordinated development and management of water, land and related resources to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems. One of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goal on water (Target 6.5) is to implement IWRM at all levels by 2030, including through transboundary cooperation as appropriate.

However, for decades the concept of IWRM has faced multiple critics due to its vague and ubiquitous definition, its complex implementation, and the lack of evidence of positive impacts across various levels. At its peak, IWRM was referred to as a “nirvana concept.” Clearly, putting IWRM into practice and demonstrating rapid benefits for livelihoods is highly ambitious and requires collective commitment in the long run.

Navigating the water sector reform in Tajikistan

Located upstream of the Aral Sea basin, which is mainly fed by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, Tajikistan is relatively rich in water resources. At the same time, the country is one of the most vulnerable to climate change in the European and Central Asian regions. While glacier melting reduces low season flows, floods and mudflows regularly — and often dramatically — affect communities living in mountainous areas. The increased variability of water availability and water scarcity also affects agriculture yields, food and nutrition security, human health and rural livelihoods’ income, exacerbating seasonal labor migration (especially to Russia), inter-ethnic tensions and outbreaks of violence among border communities.  

The reform of the national water sector in Tajikistan started in 2016 and aims to apply IWRM, shifting water management from administrative to water-related boundaries. In support of this reform, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation funded the National Water Resources Management (NWRM) project to improve water management and farmers’ livelihoods. This is achieved through implementation of IWRM across institutional levels and water-related scales in the Tajik part of the Syr Darya (TSD) basin. The project has been carried out over 12 years (ending in 2026), and targets outcomes at the national, basin, sub-basin and local levels.

Applying IWRM principles through inclusive and multi-level processes emerged as a methodological and institutional backbone not only to manage water across sectors and system scales, but also to contribute to building the climate resilience of the country and of local communities. IWRM is also strengthening cooperation between Central Asian countries willing to build more peaceful relationships through water diplomacy (e.g., Blue Peace: Water as an asset for peace).

As the implementer of the NWRM project in partnership with Acted, Helvetas is working to ensure fair representation of stakeholders’ interest and the inclusion of women, youth and vulnerable people. Our role encompasses coordinating and convening multi-stakeholder platforms; serving as a strategic partner of government agencies, civil society and private companies; being a moderator able to prevent or reduce conflicts; and advocating for and incentivizing positive change in stakeholder behavior.

Implementing IWRM in the Syr Darya basin

Rather than following a specific concept or framework, the NWRM project adopted an agile and flexible approach, primarily driven by key issues faced by people and government agencies. As a result, implementation of integrated water resources management took various forms, as detailed below.

Beyond integration, the key features of the approach were: i) simultaneous top-down and bottom-up actions and flows of information; ii) collaboration and synergies with other relevant initiatives to accelerate progress and amplify impact (e.g., with the WAPRO project that aimed at increased water productivity in farms through private sector engagement); and iii) systematic learning for adaptation, improvement and potential innovation.

The implementation of IWRM in the TSD basin started with an IWRM basin dialogue meeting in late 2014. This meeting marked the first basin-wide and multi-stakeholder dialogue on IWRM in Tajikistan. For the first time, representatives of drinking water, irrigation and industrial water users, along with governmental institutions, civil society and private sector, convened to discuss issues related to basin water management.

The success of this dialogue was replicated in other basins throughout Tajikistan and ultimately evolved into official River Basin Councils, which are consultative bodies representing the voice of all water users. While the councils provide a representative platform to guide water management decisions, River Basin Organizations were established in coordination with the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources to operationalize these decisions on the ground.

Basin Forums to boost women and youth engagement

At the basin level, NWRM organized a series of forums and delivered the first official Basin Management Plan (2022) in the country. The government of Tajikistan recommended the Syr Darya Basin Management Plan as a model to draw from in the other river basins.

In Central Asia women are significantly underrepresented in the water sector. This does not reflect their key role in using water for multiple purposes, especially for WASH and smallholder agriculture (e.g., sowing, growing and harvesting crops), and where they step in for men who migrate in search of labor. And “with the participation of women, Water User Association meetings are held with less conflicts,” said a female farmer.

To boost women’s participation and enhance appreciation of gender issues and women’s role in basin management, NWRM launched a Basin Women Forum in 2019. The event became a regular multi-stakeholder platform for dialogue and has produced roadmaps and recommendations for gender-sensitive actions that are increasingly considered in the general Basin Forums. A few years later, the project also initiated a Basin Youth Forum that now regularly gathers young people from across the region as well as from the Republic of Uzbekistan, thereby contributing to transboundary cooperation.

Watershed or landscape management? Both!

At the sub-basin level, the application of IWRM principles translated into Integrated Watershed Management. The first watershed defined along hydrological boundaries was the Tajik part of the transboundary watershed Aksu, shared with Kyrgyzstan. Mudflows and floods clearly emerged as the major issues faced by communities living upstream. To address urgent issues and their root causes, the planning objectives included reducing water-related disaster risks, using water resources more efficiently, reducing land erosion, and integrating land and water governance. Given the importance of land issues, the application of IWRM synergized with Integrated Natural Resources Management (INRM) and landscape management, resulting in an integrated disaster risk reduction watershed management.

A wide range of measures are now in place and include preparing the population for floods and mudflows (e.g., through trainings, including in schools), building small drainage canals to protect exposed villages, promoting nature-based solutions like agroforestry and passive reforestation, shifting rainfed cereals to perennial grass, and planting fast-growing willows to produce wood and reduce deforestation. The choice between infrastructure- and nature-based solutions was guided by the comparison of their respective economic, social and environmental costs and benefits.

Though the initial focus was on the national and basin levels, the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources recently recognized the importance of the sub-basin level in the Water Sector Reform. The alignment of the watershed plans with IWRM facilitated their integration in the basin plan — similar in concept to the nesting doll of development in systems change. At the district level, the Aksu watershed plan was used to elaborate the administrative District Development Plans, contributing to enhanced sustainability of watershed management.

In irrigated areas, the national reform called for the reorganization of the district departments of the Agency for Land Reclamation and Irrigation (ALRI) into larger irrigation systems as the “Aksu-Khojabakirgan-Samgar” system, merging several districts. At the same time, the first four Water User Associations were combined into an enlarged WUA of almost 700 members, covering around 5,500 hectares. This enlargement brought the opportunity to set up a new cashless payment system that resulted in increased collection of both water fees and membership fees by more than 30%. These initial steps of reorganization already improved operational efficiency, financial transparency and user contributions to local irrigation management. Additionally, the project invested in the rehabilitation of deteriorated irrigation infrastructure, further enhancing the system efficiency and helping to reduce water losses.

At the farm level, significant water savings (20-30%) were achieved jointly with the Helvetas’ WAPRO project. An increasing proportion (40-50% to 75%) of trained farmers adopted more efficient irrigation technologies such as short-furrow irrigation, mulching, alternate wetting and drying of soil, drip irrigation and accurate water-metering methods monitoring water use. Both projects successfully advocated for enhanced representation of farmers’ needs and interests in basin dialogues, and for agriculture water savings to become a key objective in the TSD basin plan.

Looking forward

The NWRM experience in Tajikistan shows that on the one hand, there is no “one-size-fits-all’ concept or framework. On the other hand, building climate resilience in water management needs accelerated implementation of IWRM principles. Climate actions will increasingly involve difficult tradeoffs and tough societal and political choices on water allocation both within a country and beyond borders in the cases of transboundary river basins and aquifers. It is essential and urgent to further develop and adapt IWRM practices and foster its contribution to the resilience of people of Central Asian countries in the face of climate change.