The SEEAW in the context of Integrated Water Resource Management and the MDGs

1. The SEEAW in the context of Integrated Water Resource Management and the MDGs Roberto Lenton Chair, Technical Committee Global Water Partnership

2. Outline • Context: The challenges of monitoring and assessing water resources for the MDGs within an integrated approach • The role and value of SEEAW within this context • Issues for the future, and the proposed round-table mechanism

3. Global Water Partnership Context: The challenges Monitoring and assessing water resources for the MDGs within an integrated approach

4. Water: impacts both on Target #10 and on the MDGs as a whole Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women Goal 4: Reduce child mortality Goal 5: Improve maternal health Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability Target 9: Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources Target 10: Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation Target 11: By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development

5. Monitoring Frameworks for the MDGs Target #10: • Established Institutional Mechanism: Joint Monitoring Programme of UNICEF/WHO • Agreed conceptual framework for defining and measuring access Water’s broader role for the MDGs as a whole: • Institutional Mechanism: the World Water Assessment Programme and the WWDRs • No agreed conceptual framework as yet

6. Why monitoring and assessing water for all the MDGs is so much more complicated! • Overall development goals (MDGs translated at national levels) • Water and development “objectives” related to goals • Actions to address these objectives, within IWRM approach • Targets to make goals, objectives and actions specific -- with defined and measurable criteria for achievement and timetables • Indicators -- to assess progress towards the targets associated with goals and objectives and the accomplishment of actions • Process indicators, which monitor the basic progress of implementing agreed actions • Outcome indicators, which monitor the direct results of actions. • Impact indicators, which monitor progress towards achieving goals and objectives.

7. Integrated Water Resources Management: Some core features • Involves developing efficient, equitable and sustainable solutions to water and development problems • Involves aligning interests and activities that are traditionally seen as unrelated or not well coordinated (horizontally and vertically) • Needs knowledge from various disciplines as well as insights from diverse stakeholders • Not just water: involves integrating water in overall sustainable development processes. Also requires coordinating the management of water with land and related resources

8. Timing is crucial • Recent establishment of SG’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation to improve global strategic focus around water • 2005 was target date for completion of “IWRM and Water Efficiency” Strategies and Plans, an action target set at WSSD • 2006 is the first year of “Water for Life” decade of action to achieve the MDGs • 2006 saw launch of series of assessments by WWDR (2006, 2009, 2012, 2015)

9. Global Water Partnership The role and value of SEEAW

10. Value of SEEAW within MDG/IWRM context • Provides the much-needed conceptual framework for monitoring and assessment • Enables consideration and quantification of inter-linkages that are critical to an IWRM approach • By integrating water and economic accounts, facilitates the mainstreaming of water policy in economic decision making • Enables linkages with other natural resource accounts (e.g., land) • Enables different stakeholders to have a consistent and transparent frame of information from which to develop recommendations • Provides effective framework for considering specific issues (e.g., allocative efficiency) • Enables further specific indicators to be derived from it • Timing is exactly right!

11. Credibility and authority are critically important too! • SEEAW has credibility and authority that comes with: • Being based on established system of national accounts • Having been developed with expertise from the statistical community • Having been tested in several countries

12. My personal view • Would be a huge step forward if framework were accepted as an internationally agreed standard for integrating hydrologic and economic statistics • Nevertheless, several issues need further work • Need a mechanism to address them while promoting implementation and use of SEEAW

13. Global Water Partnership Issues and mechanisms for the future

14. Issues to consider: the other E’s • How to address the social dimension • Supplementary accounts • Water Quality • Impact on other resources (e.g., salinity) • Uses of water for environmental goods and services • Valuation issues

15. Issues to consider: Temporal and spatial variability • Temporal variability • Hydrology and economy operate at different time scales • How to deal with extreme events, disaster risk reduction • Spatial variability • Hydrology and economy operate at different spatial scales

16. Need mechanism for continuing work • Focus on both advancing SEEAW and promoting implementation and use • Some desirable characteristics: • Involve the key actors, including the WWAP and the Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation • Include both users and producers • Include members of both statistical and the water community • Bring in additional social, economic and environmental expertise • Enable continuing testing by participating countries • Proposed roundtable on water accounting would seem to be step in the right direction

17. Thank you