FAO.org

In many regions of the world, sustainable and reliable delivery of water services has become increasingly complex and problematic. Complexities that are very likely to increase, considering the unprecedented confluence of pressures linked to demographic, economic, dietary trends, and climate change. Particularly if overall demand for freshwater exceeds supply, the delivery of water services is often less about engineering, although engineering is still required, and more about politics, governance, managing and protecting sources, resolving conflicts about water, ensuring rights to water are respected, and so on. It is also about understanding and monitoring the hydrological cycle at the appropriate scale of analysis. This is where water accounting and auditing can play a crucial role. The rationale behind this water accounting and auditing sourcebook is that scope exists worldwide to improve water-related sectoral and inter-sectoral decision-making at local, regional and national levels. Water accounting and auditing are recommended by FAO and others as being fundamental to initiatives that aim to cope with water scarcity. This sourcebook aims to provide practical advice on the application and use of water accounting and auditing, helping users planning and implementing processes that best fit their needs.

This guide is designed to stimulate and provide a clear process for the use of maps in cross-sectoral collaborations to locate, design and monitor interventions in rural landscapes. The guide presents eight steps to guide key stakeholders through a spatially explicit landscape planning process aimed at integrating goals for agricultural production, biodiversity conservation and livelihood security. The steps form a repeating process of co-learning that reinforces shared goals and understanding. Along the way, information from each step informs other steps in the next round of the process.

This manual will aid trainers of sustainable land management (SLM) professionals to organize and conduct effective courses on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) from an integrated landscape management perspective. The manual provides a curriculum for building the capacities of SLM project and program managers, as well as M&E specialists, to practice M&E in ways that support a landscape approach to SLWM. It presents a sequence of learning activities that enable trainers to introduce concepts and practices that build leadership for monitoring and evaluating SLM initiatives which stand to impact agricultural productivity, ecological conservation and livelihood security as well as institutional strengthening outcomes. Through training courses built around the curriculum, SLM leaders will gain insight into designing and implementing M&E systems that help to bring about multiple desired impacts from SLM initiatives.

SEPAL is a big-data processing platform that combines super-computing power, open-source geospatial data processing software and modern geospatial data infrastructures like Google’s Earth Engine to enable geospatial data processing anywhere in the world.

The ecosystem approach is a strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way. Application of the ecosystem approach will help to reach a balance of the three objectives of the Convention. It is based on the application of appropriate scientific methodologies focused on levels of biological organization which encompass the essential processes, functions and interactions among organisms and their environment. It recognizes that humans, with their cultural diversity, are an integral component of ecosystems. The ecosystem approach sourcebook as a tool to help practitioners implement the ecosystem approach and share experiences.