The Inter-Regional Technical Platform on Water Scarcity (iRTP-WS), led by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, seeks to bridge gaps in practice and innovation to drive transformative change in water, land, and agriculture management, particularly in the face of climate change. It focuses on enhancing system preparedness for water, food, and climate challenges through improved governance, capacity building, and e-learning.
For 2024-2025, the work plan centers on “Integrated Water Solutions: Navigating Climate Change and Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystem (WEFE) Nexus Dynamics.” The FAO Regional Office for Asia-Pacific leads Strategic Priority 1: Nexus Thinking, promoting cross-sectoral, inclusive decision-making to optimize resource use and implement sustainable WEFE-based solutions.

To support nexus-based decision-making, FAO, in collaboration with FutureWater, is developing a tool that leverages Water Accounting data to provide accessible insights into WEFE dynamics. This tool will integrate WEAP and its API into an Excel environment, streamlining scenario analysis for both projections and interventions. By combining the strengths of both platforms, it will offer an intuitive, standardized, and collaborative approach to Water Accounting, contributing to a more harmonized decision-making framework.

Achieving water security and guaranteeing the sustainable use of water resources require series of investments at the catchment scale. Yet, competing water uses pose an initial layer of complexity about the type of intervention a catchment requires. Additionally, the nature of climatic and no-climatic uncertainties, threatening possible investments, leave decision makers with insufficient knowledge about the performance of chosen intervention options in a changing world. So, decision makers require novel tools which would facilitate the description and communication of key metrics in an uncertain future.

This project studies the sensitivity of the multipurpose Chancay-Lambayeque Basin water resources hydraulic system (Peru) to changes in climatic and no-climatic forces. A series of proposed interventions to enhance the current hydraulic system look to satisfy water supply to ~400,000 people, guarantee water for increasing irrigation activities, and maintain ecological flows, while providing protection for El Niño-driven floods.

The assessment was carried out using the DMDU deiven Decision Tree Framework (DTF, Ray and Brown,2015). This is a bottom-up and two-step approach which, in this project, examined the performance of economic, resilience, robustness, and reliability metrics of selected interventions such as the construction of new reservoirs, the expansion of groundwater development, and the conservation and generation of green-infrastructure, subjected to various climate realizations. Also, the effects of changes in urban water supply and irrigation demands, siltation in existing reservoirs, and other non-climatic parameters and trade-offs were analyzed. The results of this study highlight the potential (while acknowledging limitations) of DMDU tools to prioritize investments in river catchment planning while engaging local stakeholders in decision making.