WFaS

Target

The Water Futures and Solutions Initiative (referred to herein as the WFaS Initiative) is a cross-sector, collaborative, 5-year global initiative to develop plausible and practical scenarios of the future freshwater resource supply and demand balance and the factors affecting the balance, and to identify robust, no-regret portfolios of options for balancing water systems and changing human needs while supporting ecosystem functions against a background of climate change,. The Initiative will bring together researchers and decision makers from governmental, non-governmental organizations and private industry from a variety of sectors influ-encing water management and will produce:

• A new generation of global, science-based and stakeholder-informed water scenarios that are relevant and useful to the stakeholders and are fully consistent with global scenarios being developed in other sectors and disciplines, particularly those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
• An interdisciplinary articulation of the current scientific understanding of global water challenges, includ-ing major uncertainties, using qualitative descriptions, quantitative projections based on multi-model en-sembles and comparisons, and expert opinion and analysis of available information.
• Databases, tools, and knowledge sharing networks to support scenario-based decision making at the national and sub-national scales, which will inform the global solution finding process and will stimulate the interchange of experiences, mutual learning and reciprocal capacity-building among the interested groups.

CESR participates in the scenario development process and provides global datasets on river discharge as well as water withdrawals and consumption for curent and future conditions.

Funding agency

IIASA

Project duration

January 2013  − December 2018

Project management

Martina Flörke