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Water takes on special importance in Kyrgyzstan. Also known as the «Switzerland of Central Asia», this mountainous country at the very heart of Asia is home to a complex system of rivers, lakes and glaciers, and produces an average volume of water of 2,458 km3, or the 30% of the total water resources of the region. Financial constraints, political volatility, fragentation, and the perceptions are the four barriers to adaptive capacity. An informative poster by Beatrice Mosello.
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Ms Emma Lupton, working on her Msc in Environmental Technology and Water Management at Imperial College London, provided us with her perspective on this year’s World Water Week in Stockholm.
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Groundwater is a life-sustaining resource that supplies water to billions of people, plays a central part in irrigated agriculture and influences the health of many ecosystems. Most assessments of global water resources have focused on surface water, but unsustainable depletion of groundwater has recently been documented on both regional and global scales. It remains unclear how the rate of global groundwater depletion compares to the rate of natural renewal and the supply needed to support ecosystems. The groundwater footprint is the first tool suitable for consistently evaluating the use, renewal and ecosystem requirements of groundwater at an aquifer scale.
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The summary of a technical workshop on water and climate change adaptation, held in Mexico City on 17 July 2012, is now available. The Federal Government of Mexico held a panel and a technical workshop on water and climate change adaptation, in line with two workshops of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), also to be held in Mexico City, hosted by the Government of Mexico through the National Water Commission of Mexico (CONAGUA).
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The UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is evaluating its reports on water through a survey which results will feed into the Member States discussions of whether a next phase should be approved. WIPO aims to see how the reports have been used and if they contain useful information. Topics: membrane filtration and UV water treatment, and desalination.
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This year’s World Water Week in Stockholm will focus on Water and Food Security. With this thematic scope and the launch of the UN International Year of Water Cooperation, including a global event for World Water Day to be hosted by the Netherlands on 22 March 2013, it promises to be an exciting event!
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The 2012 World Food Prize will be awarded to Dr Daniel Hillel for conceiving and implementing a radically new mode of bringing water to crops in arid and dry land regions — »micro-irrigation«. Dr Hillel’s pioneering scientific work in Israel revolutionized food production, first in the Middle East, and then in other regions around the world over the past five decades. His work laid the foundation for maximizing efficient water usage in agriculture, increasing crop yields, and minimizing environmental degradation.
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Forests are complex ecosystems with a large variability in the horizontal as well as in the vertical space. To study the dissimilarities in water use for different forest types, the water and energy balance of five forest stands in the Netherlands were observed during periods varying from 2 years to more than 15 years. On 22 May 2012, Mr Eddy Moors succesfully defended his PhD thesis on the water use of forests in the Netherlands.
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