Using climate information for climate-resilient water management: moving from science to action

This paper explores one critical challenge for promoting Climate-Resilient Water Management (CRWM) in South Asia and beyond: the availability and use of high-quality climate information. It is aimed primarily at those designing or delivering projects and programmes on CRWM, as it provides some practical guidance on the role and use of climate information. 

This paper presents learning from the Action on Climate Today (ACT) programme on how to understand the role of climate information in producing analysis and informing climate change policy and action, particularly in the water sector, and how to overcome some of the challenges involved. It starts with an overview of the definition and typology of different types of climate information, and how it can be used in different ways to inform CRWM. It presents a large number of examples of initiatives from ACT to highlight the breadth of possible types of climate information and uses. 

The paper then explores some of the major constraints to integrating climate information within the planning process, as well as some key enablers that have helped ACT overcome these challenges. A discussion then goes into more detail on specific learning from ACT from different ‘data environments’, meaning from contexts where data is more or less available than in others. The final section of the paper is targeted at those seeking to design and implement CRWM programmes and initiatives and provides some recommendations on how best to use and integrate climate information. An Annex provides a set of online sources of climate information as an additional resource for those interested in CRWM.