Interview. Without water, what’s left? Tackling water stress and protecting biodiversity
Publication year
Resource type
UNCCD Library
Economist Impact’s resident water lead and Blue Peace programmes manager Matus Samel sits down with Dr Musonda Mumba, Director of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Rome Centre for Sustainable Development. They discuss how to address water stress while supporting our precious natural systems.
Highlights
The covid-19 pandemic has highlighted our fractured relationship with nature; it indicates how (un)sustainable our current social and economic systems are.
Complex, interconnected ecosystems in diverse areas such as the Nile or the Alpine region are essential for communities in the regions while also having wider global implications.
Current management and governance systems cannot protect these complex and multi-layered ecosystems and the people who depend on them most directly, particularly women, youth and indigenous communities.
The global community, including policymakers and business leaders, needs to do much more to push ecosystem preservation and restoration to the top of their agenda. They must include local communities in the dialogue at all levels.
Earlier this year, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) highlighted drought as a global crisis. It risks becoming “the next pandemic” if countries do not urgently act on water and land management while simultaneously tackling the climate emergency.
Today, more than 2 billion people live in countries experiencing water stress, with some 3.6 billion people having inadequate access to water at least one month per year. By 2050, this is expected to rise to more than five billion. This water crisis, alongside the global degradation of natural ecosystems, has devastating consequences for all people, particularly those in the most vulnerable communities.
Global leaders are becoming more aware of how deforestation, desertification, and water stress are fuelling the climate crisis and devastating communities around the world. At COP26, nature was at the forefront, and a major pledge around halting deforestation was celebrated. Even in the year of a global pandemic, extreme weather, climate action failure, human environment damage, and biodiversity loss have been identified as four out of the top five most likely risks to materialise in World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report survey.
Read/listen to the interview further from the source
Highlights
The covid-19 pandemic has highlighted our fractured relationship with nature; it indicates how (un)sustainable our current social and economic systems are.
Complex, interconnected ecosystems in diverse areas such as the Nile or the Alpine region are essential for communities in the regions while also having wider global implications.
Current management and governance systems cannot protect these complex and multi-layered ecosystems and the people who depend on them most directly, particularly women, youth and indigenous communities.
The global community, including policymakers and business leaders, needs to do much more to push ecosystem preservation and restoration to the top of their agenda. They must include local communities in the dialogue at all levels.
Earlier this year, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) highlighted drought as a global crisis. It risks becoming “the next pandemic” if countries do not urgently act on water and land management while simultaneously tackling the climate emergency.
Today, more than 2 billion people live in countries experiencing water stress, with some 3.6 billion people having inadequate access to water at least one month per year. By 2050, this is expected to rise to more than five billion. This water crisis, alongside the global degradation of natural ecosystems, has devastating consequences for all people, particularly those in the most vulnerable communities.
Global leaders are becoming more aware of how deforestation, desertification, and water stress are fuelling the climate crisis and devastating communities around the world. At COP26, nature was at the forefront, and a major pledge around halting deforestation was celebrated. Even in the year of a global pandemic, extreme weather, climate action failure, human environment damage, and biodiversity loss have been identified as four out of the top five most likely risks to materialise in World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report survey.
Read/listen to the interview further from the source
Keywords
water stress
water scarcity
desertification
drought
human well-being
deforestation