City Water Resilience in Africa (CWRA)

Program Objective

As climate risks continue to increase, access to water has become the defining challenge of our times. Whether challenged by too much, too little or poor-quality water, City leaders in Africa face converging challenges of extending water and sanitation services for rapidly growing and urbanizing populations, managing watershed risks often largely outside city jurisdictions, and designing for climate resilience.

Program Approach

The work involves creating City Characterisation Reports for Addis Ababa and Kigali, together with completing a multi-stakeholder assessment and visioning workshops. From this each City will prepare its City Water Resilience Profile and Action Plan. Documentation is available online for previous cities that have applied the CWRA at various stages. The aim is to build a knowledge base for other cities to access for comparison and insight by sharing all materials.

This program is designed using the CWRA methodology and assessment framework as well as the Our Water governance mapping tool. It incorporates other spatial planning tools and frameworks developed by WRI that allow city-regions to identify, quantify and locate urban water risks (e.g. the Aqueduct database). 

This approach supports taking a comprehensive systems perspective to urban water resilience to inform an integrated ‘one water’ approach that supports the health and wellbeing of the community and protects the natural water cycle. The CWRA at its core helps assess the resilience of the water system a city depends on and includes upstream and downstream catchment issues.

Partners

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[1] https://www.wri.org/aqueduct
[2] https://newclimateeconomy.report/2018/executive-summary/#
[3] https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/water/publication/high-and-dry-climate-change-water-and-the-economy