Variability, Risks and Competing Uses blog posts

Providing crop insurance for smallholder farmers has been difficult in the past, leaving them vulnerable to floods, droughts, and other disasters. Now, satellite technology opens the door for insurance companies to provide affordable, timely coverage, reducing farmers' risks.

Shared risks of natural and infrastructural disaster across the water, food and energy sectors are seldom recognized until after it's too late. Is there a way to develop solutions before disaster strikes? 

Irrigated agriculture can contribute to lasting deterioration of groundwater quality, preventing its use for drinking and endangering ecosystems and bio-diversity. If we're going to get global agriculture right, we'll need to promote good groundwater governance.

On a global scale, the EU's consumption of agricultural products is perhaps the single largest driver of deforestation. This may change, with the EU's new Action Plan on Deforestation, but whether or not this plan will protect the livelihoods of smallholder farmers remains to be seen.

While WLE researchers face a variety of challenges collecting data and meeting objectives across the Greater Mekong region, the stakes are arguably highest for the partners involved in the ‘Working together for a better Kachin landscape’ project in northern Myanmar. Here, armed conflict is still common and the threat of continued fighting makes the target of equitable development an imperative.

At Stockholm World Water Week, IWMI rolled out the GRIPP initiative, a worldwide partnership for facilitating sustainable groundwater management. This piece highlights one of GRIPP's projects, which examines the use of aquifer contracts in Morocco.

The average farmer has forty years' worth of planting seasons: forty chances to improve on his or her last harvest. If farmers cannot access the finance necessary to purchase irrigation systems, that number begins to shrink.

Development banks take a reductionist approach to hydropower; the critical counter-discourse calls for more nuance. These two discourses rarely cross paths, but a new paper in Global Environmental Change directly addresses both views from a critical scientific perspective.

Every other week we read of a new water pollution scandal, often after people fall sick, but sometimes because of large-scale fish die off or other adverse environmental impacts. Can we turn the tide of growing water pollution around? 

Manythong Siharath is worried. The wetland she depends on for her livelihood is changing and changing fast! In recent years, fishing has become a lot harder and her income has dropped significantly. She like many others around the world faces a shrinking wetland while her problems only continue to grow.