River basins and watershed management: From Concept to Reality

Join Eric Tillman at his presentation on riversnetwork.org, "Targets, data, information and decision support – It’s all basin management to me" during Asia Water Week on Thursday March 14th.

Interactive Webmap of the Syr Darya Basin showing the buttons allowing selecting the layers, the zoom and the “walk around arrows.” Access this map with this link: https://www.riversnetwork.org/rbo/index.php/river-blogs/central-asia/item...

In most of the Asian river basins, economic growth and pressure on rivers and water resources is quite recent. Asia’s rapidly growing urban footprint is one of many threats that makes urban river management particularly challenging in many cities. The Yamuna (Delhi), the Bagmati (Kathmandu) and the Citarum (Jakarta) are often mentioned as the most polluted rivers in the world. Pressure on surface and groundwater resources, like in Punjab, is becoming unsustainable in many places in Asia with negative impacts on freshwaters, wetlands, environmental flows and biodiversity. In Sumatra and Java, large scale illegal logging has been widely recognised as the cause of deadly flash floods that occurred in the past decade. Obviously, here also, global climate change is a major additional destabilising factor.

Riversnetwork

To improve sustainable management of rivers, there needs to be a greater emphasis on basin and local level management.  But, there are few platforms that aggregate geographically specific information. Riversnetwork is an open, online resource that aggregates information on river basins by region. Its potential depends on the contribution of all “River Advocates”, who may suggest new case-studies, information, and awareness material that can be displayed publicly on the website.

Two tools have been developed for feeding the website: The LinkedIn group “riversnetwork.org” and the twitter account “@riversnetwork”. Twitter is developing rapidly among water sector professionals and presents a great potential in terms of water dialogue, monitoring and early flood warning.

A likely unique feature of riversnetwork.org is the possibility of crossing the case-studies in their geographical context, with a panel of basins issues and water governance areas (“tags”). This may provide elements for further benchmarking that may help decision makers and practitioners brainstorm and gain wider perspective on basin issues. At the same time, it may help create awareness and knowledge for all potential stakeholders. The interactive maps also help users gain a better understanding of river context.

Online social networks present an outstanding opportunity for boosting stakeholder’s participation, including awareness and capacity building. Since the internet is now accessible in most rural areas of the world, we hope to harness its reach by creating a platform for information sharing—widening opportunities for local stakeholder involvement, especially among the younger generation.

Confronting challenges

One of the major challenges for Asian rivers is finding the right way to get better management in the trans-boundary basins. In major rivers basins such as the Ganga, the Indus, the Irrawaddy, the Syr Darya, etc., countries have difficulties developing trans-boundary dialogues. Even rivers like the Mekong, which has a longer history of collaboration amongst the riparian states, is suffering from lack of harmonized water governance tools.

On riversnetwork.org, a tag named “Transboundary Dialogue” shows an overview of 133 examples (for the time being) of trans-boundary basin experiences around the world. Among them, the Danube river , the most international river in the world, is likely an exceptional case where harmonised water governance tools could be built thanks to the EU’s political framework.

Another challenge for Asia is the management of urban rivers. Right now, 53 case studies are proposed under the tag “Urban Rivers”. Some items show alarming situations but others show that restoration can be achieved, like the Han river in Seoul.

Other topics like “Governance” or “Basins & Watersheds Organisations” provide numerous examples showing how far information is shared among stakeholders through websites and relevant documents.

Everywhere in the world, we need to build stronger and more transparent networks between the government institutions, the public and private economic development sectors and the civil society.

How do you think we can better facilitate such networks? Would you like to contribute?

Join us at Asia Water Week March 13^th in Manila, Philippines to learn more about riversnetwork.org and how we use the internet to build networks.  A presentation of riversnetwork.org will take place on Thursday 14^th March in the morning session “Targets, data, information and decision support – It’s all basin management to me!”.  Follow live tweets from @riversnetwork and @wle_cgiar during the event.  We’ll be using #AsiaWaterWeek.