Risks to water security are the greatest threat to attaining global sustainability goals. Many countries lack water infrastructure—including storage – to be able to provide water when and where it is needed. Natural disasters are occurring with alarming frequency. Climate change is disrupting global weather patterns, triggering increasingly extreme weather events, including floods, droughts, and heatwaves, exacerbating water scarcity and causing catastrophic suffering from Pakistan to the United States to Kenya. Global heating of 2 to 4 °C could cause up to four billion people to experience some level of water scarcity. Historically, water storage systems have enabled humans to thrive in a range of climatic conditions. But as the climate changes, many water storage systems are becoming—or in some regions have already become—no longer fit for purpose. 

This event will serve as an urgent appeal to practitioners at every level, both public and private, and across sectors, to come together to champion integrated water storage solutions—natural, built, and hybrid—to meet a range of human, economic, and environmental needs for the twenty-first century. It will also serve as a launching ground for the newly released Water GP publication called What the Future Has in Store: A New Paradigm for Water Storage which draws from the World Bank’s decades of global experience with integrated water resource management. The report provides a practical framework to help with everything from evaluating long-term investments in natural and built infrastructure to decision-making under uncertainty to integrated planning techniques, and international case studies.

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