Indigenous knowledge

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Indigenous knowledge

Groundwater

Groundwater is the regulator of the entire freshwater cycle, but its invisibility makes it difficult to manage and protect.

Water governance

Good water governance is key to achieving water security, fairly allocating water resources, and avoiding disputes.

Water cooperation

Water is a growing concern in many parts of the world. Countries can improve their water resilience through transboundary water cooperation over shared waters.

Water and climate

The climate crisis is essentially a water crisis. When we treat it as such, we get new tools to mitigate climate change and adapt to consequences that are unavoidable.

In 2015, the global community launched the 2030 Agenda, with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that should be reached by 2030. Some progress has been made, but for most of the goals, the world is not on track to meet the deadline. Water can help us do better.

Water scarcity

Insufficient supply and inadequate infrastructure leaves millions of people in the world without water.

Agriculture and water

How to increase the productivity of agriculture around the world through better water management.

The impact of COVID-19

The global COVID-19 pandemic has pushed millions of people back into poverty and exposed unacceptable gaps between the rich and the poor. One in three people are still not able to wash their hands with soap and water at home.

Water and conflicts

Will future wars be fought over water? The answer is probably no, but water scarcity can contribute to conflicts.

Indigenous peoples are the custodians of many of the world’s most fragile and important ecosystems. They also possess invaluable knowledge about sustainability and resilience, so they have a vital role in protecting our environment.

Source-to-Sea

The source-to-sea approach focuses on the strong connection between what happens on land, along waterways, and in the sea.

Water in landscapes

A growing number of people, societies and companies are discovering the power of resilient landscapes. It is still possible to shift to more sustainable practices that recharge water, restore soil health, sequester carbon, and strengthen biodiversity – but we need to make the transformation now.

Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)

More than two billion people in the world lack safely managed drinking water and twice as many lack safely managed sanitation, making WASH one of the most urgent development challenges.

Rivers

While we all depend heavily on rivers for our survival, many rivers are under constant threat from unsustainable human activities

PERSPECTIVES

Youth and water

More and more young people offer important contributions to solving the growing water challenges they are inheriting.

Human rights and water

Having access to water and sanitation has been recognized as a human right since 2010. But water is also essential to ensuring the fulfilment of many other rights.

Gender and water

To improve water governance, we need to take a close look at gender roles.

Across the world, indigenous peoples already manage many water-related risks in a changing climate with traditional knowledge and solutions. In many cases, these measures align very well with the actions deemed necessary on a global scale by water and climate experts. This relationship deserves greater attention and consideration within national and global climate action arenas. Examples of this are starting to appear, but much more can be done. To put it simply: indigenous peoples represent a source of knowledge that the world cannot afford to ignore.

According to a widely recognized UN definition, indigenous peoples are communities that live within, or are attached to, geographically distinct traditional habitats or ancestral territories, and who identify themselves as being part of a culturally distinct society or community. More than 370 million people across 90 countries, or five percent of the world’s population, fit that description. Together they occupy, own, or manage an estimated quarter of the earth’s land surface, much of which is of particular importance to the protection of the world’s remaining biodiversity.

Nature Stewardship

Many indigenous value systems are built upon social-cultural values that place importance on the relationship and the interconnections between people and water. These often contain a strong ethic of stewardship as opposed to the principle favoured in many other contexts, which focuses entirely on water as a resource. Such ethics usually imply a role in protecting and managing water bodies in a sustainable way.

Many indigenous peoples’ systems look to balance immediate and future human needs with those of plants, animals, and spirits, based on traditional ecological knowledge and principles and practices. This is based on a deeply rooted water wisdom and experience that should not be ignored. Rather must we find ways to promote and incorporate these perspectives in our climate action, particularly in a water context.