Natural water infrastructure

“Biodiversity drives soil functions supporting hydrological processes, global agriculture and forestry production; and, therefore, food security”.

Within this, we can realise about the importance of maintaining the balance between all the different fields of the ecosystem in relation with human activities, because they are constantly affecting one to another. This gives us a big picture, and i am going to focus in this post in water matters, because we have to be aware that threats are coming in this subject.

is something important to keep in mind that, from the 85% of available water, the 12% of the population live without safe drink water, and the 40% (2.5 billion people) do not have adequate sanitation.  If we do not manage this situation, by 2025,“1.8 billion people would be living with absolute water scarcity and two of third of the world population could be under water stress conditions”.

One of the main issues which is affecting water resources is the climate change, but also human activities, for instance, agriculture among others. The amount of water demanded from agriculture, and the impacts that it is producing in water quality (irrigation, salinization, etc.) are main problems for water resources, and they act as a key management in water security.  We can point it out, that agriculture remains a 67% on water and it works as one of the biggest pollutants of watercourses. In Asia, for example, we have the case that 7.5 billion tons of sediments are generated for not proper managed agriculture land.

So we can go through the conclusion that, ADAPTATION is mainly about better water management, because of supply and quality are becoming insecure for all uses.

So through idea of adaptation, we can refer to something reachable for everyone: the ecosystem.  Ecosystem functioning as a natural water infrastructure and its devastation is, in most of the times, the root of all disasters occurred.  “Forests pro­tect water supplies, wetlands regu­late floods, healthy soils increase wa­ter and nutrient availability for crops, help reduce off-farm impacts, and natural and man-made wetlands and buffer strips can be effective in managing nutrient run-off and pollu­tion”.

Governments and organizations willingness is increasing, as the same time that the use of natural infrastructure is growing. They are taking more and more approaches. For instance, the UNEP started arising the awareness in local and global areas of well-managing ecosystems.

This could bring economic advantages, as reduction in cost of damage for carbon emissions, or the maintenance of hard infrastructures. So as we can see managing natural infrastructure is a “requisite for sustained economic growth”.   We have plenty of interventions for improving the well-manage of the water delivered by ecosystems to the cities. But the real thing is that we are all water managers, and this issue needs the cooperation of everyone, from local to international levels. Water resources and biodiversity has always been managed in separate sectors, but the aim is reach a cross-sectoral working, where good governance structures and stakeholders work together in decision-making for water management strategies.

Sources:

http://www.zaragoza.es/contenidos/medioambiente/onu/1006-eng.pdf

http://www.cbd.int/doc/newsletters/development/news-dev-2015-2013-05-en.pdf

http://www.iisd.org/freshwater/

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