Groundwater experts from research, administration, NGOs and industry from over 50 countries will meet in Davos from 8-13.9.2024 to discuss new findings and current challenges relating to groundwater. Join for the focus day on groundwater for humanitarian aid and SDGs on Tuesday 10.9.2024.

• Discover and debate the critical role that groundwater can play for humanitarian aid and to reach sustainable development goals.
• Discuss how the resource can be characterized and managed sustainably in different societal contexts, balancing the needs of society and the environments.
• Participate in a networkshop for early career participants and develop innovative ideas to address challenging issues.
• Visit the exhibition with innovative products and services
• Network with groundwater professionals from more than 50 countries.

THEMATIC SESSIONS

Over 400 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, with water supply being one of the life-saving and sustaining needs, and approximately 4 billion people experience water scarcity for at least 1 month per year. Humanitarian crises are increasingly evolving into protracted situations and from rural towards urban and peri-urban settings, with significant consequences on water supply. The humanitarian community, including donors, increasingly recognizes the importance of developing sound hydrogeological approaches in search of innovative and sustainable solutions, which account for the context specific challenges as well as the financial constrains affecting the whole sector.

In the session, different stakeholders involved in hydrogeology in humanitarian contexts will present their developed tools and approaches, to show case examples and lessons learnt and to bring forward valuable collaborations and partnerships namely with national partners such as universities, local governments and water utilities. Additionally, given the increase in demand to develop groundwater supplies in these contexts, the session addresses the challenges to conduct both groundwater assessments, development and subsequent monitoring. Such approaches should seek to address how groundwater can be better ‘made visible’ to allow safe access to sustainable water supplies and to meet the needs during emergencies, and to demonstrate how such interventions are contributing to the humanitarian development nexus.

This session is an opportunity to reinforce a professional community around the specific field of hydrogeology in humanitarian contexts, creating a dedicated space in the landscape of the WASH sector, within which it is often scattered.

Many in the world are still gripped by a water supply crisis. One in four people lack access to safe water at home, and approximately 750 million still lack access to even basic water services in their community. The solutions are not simple but increasingly involve the development and supply of local groundwater resources. Sustainable groundwater supplies that are resilient through drought and functional over the long-term have been demonstrated to increase the resilience of people living in marginalized environments. Securing groundwater for food security is also a growing challenge in many low- and middle-income countries, as rainfall becomes increasingly unreliable, and demand for food grows.

In this session we will explore how groundwater is being developed to help transform some of the world’s most vulnerable and fragile communities. We will examine both the challenges and successes in locating, developing and supplying safe groundwater in low-income countries and discuss innovative methods for developing groundwater and how these can be scaled up. In the session we will also discuss how the hydrogeological environment impacts on the feasibility, cost and sustainability of groundwater development and how this interacts with the local social, economic and institutional context.

Conjunctive management of water resources is known to be a powerful means to addressing crises from climate change, water shortages and quality deterioration. So many of the world’s river basins are facing declining surface resources, in which groundwater is now being spontaneously utilised as replacement. Unfortunately, groundwater remains the ‘Cinderella’ of water resources – it is there in the background, but remains unseen in explicit policies, legal regimes, and accessible financing. This, ‘spontaneous conjunctive use’ approach, is becoming more widespread, and is resulting in chaotic resources governance thus further undermining water security. These symptoms have been recognised by many actors in the water sector. There is a real interest in moving from “chaos to order” and the recognition that aquifers are at the heart of fundamental hydrological interactions and hence need to be explicitly addressed. Enhanced conjunctive management, where groundwater is at the centre of attention, may require retrofitting of policies and practices, which may be complex in some situations, but holds great potential to address the common issues faced in many regions.
The session is devoted to improving measures, policies, and practice for how to ensure that conjunctive management, with aquifers at its core, can be adopted to enhance water security and sustainability under greater water demands and climate change, from local to transboundary scales

The session will focus on methods and approaches to sustainable water management at the watershed level, illustrated by case studies. Water stewardship is a concept based on the need for collective action to address current and/or future shared water challenges. It requires a scientific approach (understanding the hydrogeological context, potential challenges and threats to water quantity, quality, aquatic ecosystems… etc.) combined with a strong stakeholder engagement pillar. So far, water stewardship has been addressed mainly through social and economic sciences rather than the hydrogeology community. The private sector uses frameworks such as the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) standard as guidance and methodologies such as Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting (VWBA) to measure the outcomes of the projects they contribute to.
The aim of the session is to promote discussion between different sectors (academia, private sector, public administrations and institutions, NGOs…) on the right approach(es) to address common water challenges at the local level. It will explore how the hydrogeological community can be more involved and how potential synergies with academia can be created.