A new Water and Climate Coalition has been launched to close the water information gap and to tackle growing water and climate-related impacts. The aim is to achieve more effective integrated policy-making in an era when climate change, environmental degradation and population growth has exacerbated water-related hazards and scarcity.
The coalition was announced at a UN high-level general assembly event on March 18 to speed up lagging progress toward the water-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and in particular SDG6 on clean water and sanitation for all.
WMO spearheads the new coalition as a major obstacle to providing efficient and sustainable water solutions is the lack of information about currently available water resources and future availability. Currently, around 60% of WMO member states report declining capabilities in hydrological monitoring.
“We are seeing a growing amount of disasters. And many of those disasters are related to water… The biggest impacts of climate change have to do with water,” said WMO secretary-general Professor Petteri Taalas. “We have to adapt to climate change. And one of the powerful ways to adapt to climate change is to invest in early warning services and meteorological and hydrological services.”
For more information on the new coalition, click here. https://www.water-climate-coalition.org/