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Loading ...The “ecosystem approach” is a strategy for integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way. Meeting people’s needs is a central element of the ecosystem approach that aims to: i) maintain ecosystem functions and services; ii) enhance equitable sharing of benefits; iii) promote adaptive management strategies; iv) implement management actions through decentralization; v) foster inter-sectoral and inter-disciplinary cooperation.
Tagged in :ecosystem approach, environmental flows, IWRM
Stefano Barchiesi
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ecosystem approach, environmental flows, IWRM
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The “ecosystem approach” is a strategy for integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way. Meeting people’s needs is a central element of the ecosystem approach that aims to: i) maintain ecosystem functions and services; ii) enhance equitable sharing of benefits; iii) promote adaptive management strategies; iv) implement management actions through decentralization; v) foster inter-sectoral and inter-disciplinary cooperation.
The ecosystem approach has thus emerged as a promising step-wise process to dealing with integration and sustainability of water management. This is because it provides a number of benefits for both people and nature in terms of integrating environment in decision making, strengthening investment in ecosystems and social inclusion, and catalyzing good governance. Moreover, the ecosystem approach is well adapted to the use of a wider variety of management tools and options. In particular, it deploys alternative non-structural measures to cope with floods and droughts as well as emissions of pollutants into surface and ground waters.
It thus comes as no surprise that the need for such an approach has increasingly been recognized among water professionals. It takes into account the role of environmental goods and services, incorporates knowledge about the functioning of the entire catchment ecosystem into planning and management, and focuses on managing both water and land resources within catchments and river basins. It explicitly recognizes the need to maintain river ecosystem health for example, through protection of vegetation cover in upper-catchments, maintenance of river flow for people downstream, or reduction of pollution for good water quality. In other words, ecosystem services address water security.
IUCN’s experience of demonstration of the ecosystem approach to IWRM in river basins around the world has shown that, by combining new management tools, with governance reforms, innovative financing and social learning, the ecosystem approach makes IWRM implementation practical and achievable.
IUCN Water And Nature Initiative (WANI) demonstrated ecosystem management in river basins, including:
- Tacana (Guatemala/Mexico)
- Barra de Santiago – El Impossible (El Salvador)
- Huasco (Chile)
- Azraq (Jordan)
- Marj Sanour (Palestine)
- Volta (Burkina Faso/Mali)
- Komadugu Yobe Basin (Nigeria)
- Pangani (Tanzania)
- Okavango (Botswana)
- Mekong (Thailand/Laos/Cambodia/Vietnam)
Nadi (Fiji)
The history of WANI started in 2000 with the World Water Vision, based on recognition that water is the basis for all living ecosystems, envisioned in a world in which adequate water is provided to meet basic human needs in an equitable manner and in harmony with nature.
With global consensus on the Millennium Development Goals, transformation to sustainability must be embedded in development and universal goals for reducing poverty. The key element of the new paradigm advocated in the Water and Nature Vision was identified as implementing IWRM using an ecosystem approach within river basins.
WANI was structured around five more strategic objectives: 2) to support wise governance of water resources and wetlands, 3) to develop and apply economic tools and incentive measures, 4) to empower people to participate in sustainable water management, 5) to improve knowledge to support decision making, 6) to learn lessons to raise awareness on wise water use.
WANI-1 (2001–2008) was implemented through a portfolio of more than 25 individual projects. The second phase of the Initiative began in 2009 and is envisaged to continue until 2013. It has built on the foundations of the first phase with some projects scaled up into a second phase, whilst other projects have been developed to support application of WANI results in emerging processes of national and regional change and strategy setting.
To deconstruct the different steps that make up the ecosystem approach in practice, one will have to answer the following questions:
- What is the water problem?
- What ecosystem services are needed to solve this problem (alongside technological and infrastructure needs)?
- What actions are needed?
- What governance is needed to enable action?
- Who needs to be empowered to act?
- What incentives and financing are needed?
- What knowledge and capacities are needed?
It was recognised from the outset that the budget for WANI was small relative to the many billions invested annually in water management. The underlying intent of WANI was to use innovative and well-targeted activities to guide future investments and, most importantly, to be a catalyst for wider change needed to make the future of water and development sustainable.
A standardized framework was developed to ensure that projects were aligned with the WANI objectives and could be efficiently monitored. In addition, a more focused reporting framework was initiated in order to capture results and outputs against a defined set of benchmark indicators. A review of project results, lessons learned and experience from project management to date reveals a set of common features that are associated with better results and can thus be measured: new access to information, social learning, short-term wins, institutional development, policy linkages, new coalitions, decentralization of decision-making, governance coordination across scales, leadership, leveraging to deliver large-scale impacts.
Successful projects have been key in delivering results and thus in enabling implementation of IWRM in practice in real-world systems facing real-world problems and constraints. However, the ambition of WANI, with its goal of mainstreaming, is wider than a set of project results used as a basis for learning. WANI was designed explicitly to use innovative and well targeted activities to guide future investments and, most importantly, to be a catalyst for wider change needed to make the future of water and development sustainable. WANI therefore seeks impacts on larger scales and over longer time periods than occurs under discrete projects.
In contrast to project outcomes, which are changes in the ‘behaviour’ of people, institutions or ecosystems over the course of a project, impacts are long-term changes that contribute to achieving policy goals. WANI therefore needs to be aligned to ‘impact pathways’ that will scale up results to impacts. Impact pathways are shaped by the link between the influence of project results and two processes: 1) the transition of new ‘discourse’, or shared conception of water management, to water policy; and 2) the inter-connection between the behaviour of (individual) people and the structures of institutions.
The following are the case studies that best exemplify the key lessons learnt:
To complement planning with river basin demonstration projects,
- combine livelihoods pilots and bottom-up coordination (Tacana, Guatemala/Mexico)
- share lesson from villager-led action research (Mekong , Thailand/Laos/Cambodia/Vietnam)
- demonstrate decentralization of water management institutions (Nadi, Fiji):
To communicate evidence on what works for both livelihoods and ecosystem services maintenance,
- build trust and capacity with livelihoods projects (Volta, Burkina/Mali)
- community-led planning of water resources (Azraq, Jordan and Marj Sanour, Palestine)
- promote environmental flows in the Andean Countries Huasco (Chile)
For good water governance, local stakeholders are integral to both planning and implementation,
- stakeholder dialogues for negotiating water allocations ( Pangani, Tanzania)
- networks of community associations for better water management (BASIM, El Salvador)
- institutional coordination for accessing information (Okavango, Botswana)
For all of the above,
- and to finance water resource management sustainably (Komadugu Yobe Basin, Nigeria)
WANI projects have incorporated alignment with four scaling-up strategies:
1) Consensus Building
2) Dialogue
3) Joint Action
4) Policy Framing
These are determined by the ‘impact pathways’ above. Examples of how they have been used in practice in WANI can be found on: http://www.waterandnature.org/en/results/results-report
Stefano Barchiesi
Project Officer, Global Water Programme
IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature)
28 rue Mauverney, CH-1196 Gland, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 999 0255; Mob: +41 79 897 6430
Fax: +41 22 364 9622; Skype: stefano.barchiesi
Email: stefano.barchiesi@iucn.org
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