AWARe Initiative

About AWARe Initiative

• It is an initiative of African Union (AU), Water and Climate Coalition Leaders, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW).
• It will catalyze inclusive cooperation to address water as a key to climate change adaptation and resilience including partnerships for early warning systems and early action.
• Aims: Offering transitional adaptation solutions for the planet and people, starting with the world`s most vulnerable communities and ecosystems.
  • To minimise the challenges that trouble the world’s vulnerable communities and ecosystems.
• Focus Area: It will have an Africa-first focus, giving hope to drought-ravaged populations, especially in the Horn of Africa.
• AWARe focuses on three priorities:
  • Decrease water losses worldwide and improve water supply.
  • Propose and support implementing policies for cooperative water-related adaptation action.
  • Cooperation and interlinkages between water and climate action.
• Objectives: To decouple economic growth from freshwater use and degradation.
  • Develop national utilization plans, adaptation and mitigation strategies and protect and restore freshwater ecosystems.
  • Seek cooperative analysis of river basin scale adaptation and mitigation options and risk of mal-adaptation.
  • Support mutually agreed policy solutions to advance a ‘do-no-harm’ approach.

AWARe Initiative Targets

• Reversing loss of water from the land surface;
• More crop per drop, less CO2 per calorie;
• 50% less damage from floods and droughts by 2030;
• Joint monitoring and analysis partnerships cover the whole region/world;
• 50% increase in number of regional operational cooperation frameworks;
• Reducing the methane emissions resulting from lakes and reservoirs pairing with the methane global pledge;
• Increasing the amount of desalinated water from renewables to cities to make them more sustainable.

Strategies of AWARe Initiative

• Water information strategies: To set global water information services like accurate hydrological data to help understand the scarcity and availability of water per region.
  • It also has a water and climate stock take that integrates water and climate-related databases to inform decision-making.
• Cryosphere information mechanism: This details data on frozen water parts of the earth, like waters that surround Antarctica and the Arctic and a new financing rationale focusing on areas of priority is also a part of it.
• Need for local engagements: To implement climate-resilient investments on the ground at different government levels and a need for regional cooperation is necessary for shared early warning systems to reduce the impact of loss.
• It calls for concerted efforts to stop pollution, manage wastewater and restore or preserve water towers and catchment areas, including glaciers and snow that are melting away, impacting sources of streams and rivers.

AWARe Initiative Need

• According to a World Bank report of 2021, over the past 20 years, water-related hazards have consistently increased in frequency and intensity, with at least 1.6 billion people affected by floods and 1.4 billion by droughts.
• According to World Meteorological Organization (WMO), weather, climate or water-related disaster has occurred on average every single day within the past 50 years (1970-2019), taking the lives of 115 people daily and causing US$ 202 million in daily losses.
• According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), early warning systems do not cover a third of the world’s population, doubling the risk of the number of individuals exposed to floods and droughts due to climate change.
• Global Water Crisis is currently affecting billions of people worldwide and is projected to be further aggravated by increasing demand, changing water availability and increasing impacts of floods and droughts
  • Currently, 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water at least a month per year and this is expected to increase to more than 5 billion by 2050.
  • Between 2001 and 2018, UN-Water reported that 74% of all natural disasters are water-related (i.e. flood and droughts).

Conference of the Parties or COP

• COP is the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
  • COP27 is the 27th meeting on climate change in Egypt.
  • The first one was held in Berlin in 1995.
  • The COP meets every year, unless the Parties decide otherwise.
  • There are now 197 Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, all of whom have signed the Paris Agreement, the first global climate pact.
• The Paris Agreement: Signed at COP21 in 2015, it’s goal is to limit global warming to well below two degrees, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.
• COP-27: Delegates from the 197 nations and territories are meeting from November 6 through November 18 in Egypt with the key aim of ensuring full implementation of the Paris Agreement.
• At COP27, India is calling on rich countries to live up to their promise of providing $100 billion in annual climate finance to developing nations.

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