ITS EDUCATION ASIA ARTICLE

Escalating Climate Crisis Reveals Need for New Paradigm for Water

By Danny Harrington, MD ITS Education Asia

An interesting article by Drs. Hassan Aboelnga, Olcay Unver and Johannes Cullman in IISD, highlights the way in which till now those advocating for SDG6 have perhaps been too siloed. The solution they say is to highlight water more broadly in the wider climate agenda so that we retain the interconnective element that the SDG framework is supposed to promote and facilitate.

One of the key components of climate change is the redistribution of water volume by changing precipitation patterns and the associated changes to evapo-transpiration by changed cloud cover patterns. Thus we see drought and flooding increasing in frequency and severity as places begin to see lower and higher rates of precipitation and at different times of year than was previously experienced.

Thus any successful interventions that address SDG 6 must take climate change into account and strategies aimed at SDG13 should explicitly be considering SDG6 outcomes as well.