Building Resilience within Water Scarce Landscapes –Storing Rainwater to Cope with Droughts and Harness Floods for Climate Smart Agriculture
Cairo Water Week – Theme 3: Water Related adaptation to Climate Change - Topic 3.2: Water Conservation Innovations, Rainfall Harvesting, Channel Lining, and Modern & Smart Irrigation.
Cairo Water Week, 2022
FAO-RNE hosts an interesting session at Cairo Water Week focusing on the opportunities of storage across scales (from in-situ to broader scales) and give examples of FAO’s joint work with partners working Rain Water Harvesting (RWH).
The need to secure food security is leading many countries in the NENA region to push water allocation to its limits. This is putting water security at risk if no action is taken to curb water allocation particularly to agriculture. On one hand, agriculture is already the main water users in the region and asked to reduce its use. On the other hand, climate change impacts on rainfall will require rainfed agriculture to adapt when rainfall fails by adding water through irrigation or landscape water management to ensure food production and food security. The Climate change is putting food security also at risk without increasing water allocation to agriculture.
Speakers from FAO, ICARDA, ESCWA, addressed various aspects of the subject, ranging from climate change at watershed level resilience plans to in-situ RWH feasibility. Participants also discussed Water Accounting use in the fate of water with RWH at scale.
Enhancing the agriculture sector Resilience in the area aims to ppromoting sustainable agriculture that encourages efficient use of resources including: Promotion of good agricultural practices; Rehabilitation of irrigation canals; Use of drip irrigation; Use of renewable energy to generate power needed for irrigation; Implementation of micro-catchment rainwater harvesting systems at farm level; and Construction of hill reservoirs at large and medium scale (provide water for supplementary irrigation).
The Session gave a snapshot of FAO’s joint work with ESCWA and ICARDA to build resilience within Water Scarce Landscapes. The Session was concluded with a message from Mohamed El Hamdi, Senior Land and Water Officer–(FAO-RNE), “Water harvesting has been traditionally practiced in the region for hundreds of years and the community participation has been the heart for sustaining such practice.”
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Cairo Water Week 16th-19th October 2022