: Opinion: Focus on adapting to climate change #IndiaNEWS #News By Balsher Singh Sidhu More than half the world’s population faces water scarcity for at least one month every year. Meanwhile, some

Opinion: Focus on adapting to climate change #IndiaNEWS #News
By Balsher Singh Sidhu
More than half the world’s population faces water scarcity for at least one month every year. Meanwhile, some people have to deal with too much water, while others have access to only poor water quality. That’s billions of people living with drought in Africa and India, facing flood risks in Bangladesh or lacking clean water due to excessive fertilizer use in the United States, Brazil, China and India.
Climate change exacerbates global water insecurity because it contributes to more frequent and severe droughts, floods and extreme rainfall, accelerated glacier melt, rapid declines in groundwater and the deterioration of water quality. These water-related risks have negative repercussions for agriculture, energy production, water infrastructure and economic productivity, as well as human health, development and well-being around the world.
Water is central to the discussions about how societies, economies and governments adapt to climate change, and the vast majority of adaptation strategies already in place are water-related. Yet researchers know little about how effective they are.
As a researcher in the field of climate change and sustainable food systems, I was part of a team that reviewed more than 1,800 case studies for the “Water�? chapter of ‘Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’, the second part of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. This newly released report is the most comprehensive review of climate impacts and how much we can adapt to them since 2014.
Water Strategies
The United Nations defines water security as having sustainable access to enough water of adequate quality to support people’s well-being, livelihoods and health, without jeopardising ecosystems. Water insecurity covers a spectrum of issues — too much, too little, too dirty.
Unsurprisingly, a large majority of countries have listed water as the priority for adaptation in their climate change plans. In our review of more than 1,800 climate change adaptation strategies, we found that over 80% were water-related. Some were in response to water hazards (droughts, floods, groundwater depletion, glacier depletion). In others, the response itself was water-related (irrigation, rainwater harvesting and wetlands conservation).
Yet when we looked at the outcomes of these water-based adaptation strategies, we found that only 359 had been analysed for effectiveness, meaning that we do not know if most of these strategies actually reduce the impacts of climate change and improve health, well-being and livelihood.
Adaptation strategies that are enacted without adequate investigation of their effectiveness not only waste scarce resources, but can also distract us from taking more relevant actions that carry larger benefits for the affected population.

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