Page 57 - Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

The United Nations General Assembly had designated
March 22nd as the annual international World Water Day
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in 1993 in order to focus attention on the importance of
water as the foremost natural resource and to advocate for
sustainable management of global freshwater resources.
Recognition of water scarcity became even more important
over the following decades when research into, and
observation of, climate change impacts was conducted
cohesively under the umbrella of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that
was formally adopted on 21 March 1994. In its Fourth
Assessment Report ‘Climate Change 2007’ under the
UNFCCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC)’s Working Group II (on climate change impacts,
adaptation and vulnerability) included water resources and
their management as one of the key areas projected to be
impacted by climate change. Its projections included the
following conclusions: 170

• Run-off and water availability are projected to increase at high latitudes and in some wet tropics
and decrease over much of the mid-latitudes and dry tropics, some of which are already water-
stressed areas.
• The extent of drought-affected areas will probably increase, and extreme precipitation events
are likely to increase in frequency and intensity, and augment flood risk.
• Hundreds of millions of people are projected to be exposed to increased water stress.

These projections paint an especially disquieting picture when viewed in the context of the existing
water-consumption trends compiled by UN-Water and other UN bodies (as seen in Box 11). Working
closely with UN-Water, UNESCO has been producing the World Water Development Report series,
the annual flagship publication of the United Nations that offers a comprehensive assessment of the

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