Water Water Everywhere

Happy New Year! As 2013 gets underway we have one more retrospective on the year past. 2012 saw water issues crop up repeatedly. Droughts, flooding, and storms brought the extremes of water availability into focus, and the dependency of agriculture on the resource made it a key sector. Several case studies from landscapes worldwide highlighted these issues.

The World Agroforestry Center shared one effort to preserve environmental integrity in the Sasumua Watershed in Kenya, using a payment for ecosystem services model. A potential water fund is under discussion to help fund activities that will improve water quality and quantity. In another example, a Winrock International project in the floodplains of Bangladesh demonstrated the benefits of community management of aquatic resources at the watershed scale.

The usually climate-skeptical United States began to pay more attention after a severe summer drought decimated yields in the country’s corn belt. In fact, the agricultural community in the US is starting to think about measures to adapt to a new normal of water scarcity in this major farming region of the world.

And the water community gets it. At the UN Convention on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, the UN held World Water Day and tackled integrated approaches to water management that span sectors and geographic and political boundaries (read more on transboundary water resources). Finally, the Landscapes Blog also honored World Oceans Day by exploring the many linkages between land-based activities and marine ecosystems.

Looking forward to the year ahead, there are sure to be new exemplars of landscape approaches, new developments in major policy processes around the globe, and a host of new challenges and opportunities to tackle. Here’s to an exciting 2013 on the Landscapes Blog.