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Water

Stepping Up Efforts to Address Water Issues

Diego Juan Rodriguez's picture

As recognized by the World Economic Forum at Davos earlier this year, water insecurity is one of the greatest risks facing the world today.  Increased water demand from growing populations and economies, combined with more uncertainty in supply due to expected climate change impacts, require a radical change in the priority we give to managing our water resources and systems to supply water to people.  Over the next two decades, water will be needed to feed a planet of 9 billion people and generate energy to meet increased demand.

Cutting Water Consumption in Concentrated Solar Power Plants

Julia Bucknall's picture

Concentrated solar power (CSP) systems are a great promise for renewable energy at scale.  But they can use a lot of water, which is a problem since they tend to be located in places where water is scarce. Some concentrated solar technologies need to withdraw as much as 3,500 liters per Megawatt hour (MWh) generated. This compares to 2,000 liters/MWh for new coal-fired power plants and 1,000 liters/MWh for more efficient natural gas combined cycle power plants. 

Silicon Valley: Inspiration Tour Ends, Ideas Just Beginning

Sanitation Hackathon Team's picture

As mentioned in the previous post, the three grand prize winning teams of the Sanitation Hackathon boarded from their home countries – Indonesia, Senegal, Tanzania, and the UK – for a week-long trip to Silicon Valley, hosted by IDEO.org. They met with companies such as Zynga, the world’s leading social gaming company, Facebook, the social network giant, AirBnB, a travel site, The Hub, a collaborative work space, and Indiegogo, a crowdfunding platform. The young web developers learned about the importance of data, how to reach large networks, why trust and collaboration are key, and what makes a crowdfunding campaign successful. 

Silicon Valley: Where Innovation Meets Development

Sanitation Hackathon Team's picture

Sanitation Hackathon LogoThe Sanitation Hackathon & App Challenge three grand prize winners, mSchool, Taarifa, and SunClean, flew over from their home countries, Senegal, Tanzania, England, and Indonesia to attend the awards ceremony in Washington, DC. With a 64inch touchscreen provided by Microsoft, the teams showcased their apps to sanitation sector specialists at the WB-IMF side event on Investing in Sanitation.

An Accounting System Worthy of Earth Day: Natural Capital Accounting

Rachel Kyte's picture

When presidents, prime ministers, and government ministers of more than 60 nations put their countries’ names behind natural capital accounting last year at Rio+20, something shifted. Countries wanted a better way of measuring progress that went beyond GDP and factored in nature and its services.

Clearly that was no flash in the pan. Last week, I chaired a high-level ministerial dialogue on the margins of the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings where government ministers and senior representatives of more than 40 countries came together to compare notes on how natural capital accounting is working for them.

Country after country – represented by finance, development, or environment ministers – talked about how natural capital accounting fit their countries’ priorities and how it could be a tool to address some of their key policy challenges. With each statement from the floor, it was clear that natural capital accounting is no longer an academic concept. It is alive and well and being utilized across the world in developing, middle, and high-income countries.

Improving access to water services in Metro Manila through an output-based approach

Ana Silvia Aguilera's picture
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Last month, during a visit to the Philippines I had the opportunity to meet some of the 28,000 families* whose lives have been changed by the Manila Water Supply Pilot Project.

We visited Southville in Barangay San Isidro in the Rodriguez Municipality.  This neighborhood was built from a government-financed housing project that resettled about 10,000 poor households. They used to be informal settlers, some living along the Manggahan floodway or Pasig River that were affected by the flood caused by typhoon Ondoy (International name: Ketsana).

Can Tanzania achieve its Green Revolution?

Jacques Morisset's picture

Let's think together: Every Sunday the World Bank in Tanzania in collaboration with The Citizen wants to stimulate your thinking by sharing data from recent official surveys in Tanzania and ask you a few questions.

Agriculture is the mainstay of Tanzania’s rural economy and the livelihood of most of the country’s poor. As a result, rural incomes and poverty reduction are closely linked to agricultural productivity. Yet, according to FAO, yields for important staple crops in Tanzania remain very low:
- With a maize yield of 1.3 metric tons per hectare (mt/ha) in 2011, Tanzania ranks behind Kenya and Ghana (1.6 mt/ha); and way behind Vietnam (4.3 mt/ha) or China (5.7 mt/ha).
- A similar pattern holds for rice (paddy), with Tanzania’s yield of 2.0 mt/ha in 2011 being comparable to only about half of Kenya’s (4.0 mt/ha), and less than one third of China’s (6.7 mt/ha) in that year.
- It is noteworthy too that there has been no general upward trend in yields over the past two decades, though there is considerable annual variation due to rainfall patterns.

Toilets: There’s an App for That

Jose Luis Irigoyen's picture

It’s no secret that the rapid rise in access to mobile phones has created a new vehicle for the delivery of information and services, particularly for people at the base of the pyramid – or those who live on less than $1.25 a day. The challenge we, as development practitioners, face is understanding how to leverage mobile phones in ways that empower citizens as agents of change who can influence and drive development processes in their communities.

The U.S. Drought Monitor: A Sophisticated Tool, But Do Not Be Intimidated by It

Nate Engle's picture

Evaluating the existence and extent of droughts is not an easy task. Not only are droughts "slow-onset" events that creep into the physical, environmental, and social systems of a region, they also have effects that span numerous sectors of a society. The U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM), as recently described by Dr. Michael Hayes from the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) during a recent presentation at the World Bank, provides an example for other nations as they consider how to effectively manage this difficult endeavor of characterizing drought risks and impacts.

Innovation and Partnership Lie at the Heart of Cooperation in Water

Nansia Constantinou's picture

The world commemorated World Water Day on March 22 with events around the globe focusing on ways to make international cooperation happen in the water. Events held in celebration of the Day covered all aspects of water - from water supply and sanitation, to water and its nexuses with food and energy, water resources management and water and climate change. But in most, if not all of these events, one theme was clearly cross-cutting: the importance of strengthening partnerships to leverage knowledge and facilitate innovative solutions.

From Water Pumps in Cambodia to Global Social Enterprise Support

Dougg Jimenez's picture

Combining the experience of running the DM2006 award winning social enterprise: Ideas-at-Work (IaW), the knowledge acquired with the Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) program (2007), and her recent completion of an MBA (2012), Angelique Smit decided to found the Social Enterprise Support initiative, a network group that provides support and advice to fellow social entrepreneurs in a variety of areas.

Created after intense consultation with social entrepreneurs about their support needs in their path to build successful business models, Social Enterprise Support (SE-Support) emerged as a place where social entrepreneurs from all over the world find fellow social-minded entrepreneurs for a sounding board, bouncing ideas, brainstorming or advice.

Water Cooperation at the National Level: The Case of Kenya

Dr. Robert Kibugi is a Legal/Institutional Expert for Ministry of Water and Irrigation in Kenya and a lecturer at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Environmental Law and Policy (CASELAP), University of Nairobi.

Legal and institutional changes in the Kenyan water sector are not new; the current water law was enacted in 2002. The law introduced extensive changes and reforms, including a separation between water resource management and water services that allows specialized agencies to perform the tasks.

This resulted in creation of the Water Resource Management Authority (WRMA) to manage and regulate water resources, and the Water Services Regulatory Board (WASREB) to regulate water services. The latter regulates the functions of Water Services Boards (WSBs), responsible for developing infrastructure, and those of water service providers (WSPs), which are primarily utilities that purchase water from WSBs and sell to consumers. Beyond water services and resources, the areas of water storage and irrigation, which address harvesting and productive use of water, were not part of the 2002 reforms.

New Ways to Measure Heat on Earth's Surface Could Revolutionize Agricultural Water Management

Julia Bucknall's picture

Yesterday, on the eve of World Water Day, NASA and the United States Geological Survey released the first images from the thermal imaging band of its latest launch of the LANDSAT satellite. The satellite will begin regularly producing data on May of this year. Why does that matter? It is the latest improvement in a technology that, in my opinion, has the power to revolutionize water management around the world.

For Water and non-Water Wonks: A World Water Day 2013 (not comprehensive) Reading List

Given that World Water Day, March 22, is not even underway in a large part of the world, at the time of this writing, the amount of World Water Day coverage is no small thing. Here is how World Water Day (eve) has unfolded across the World Bank’s social media and websites.


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