The Australian Water Partnership is supporting its partners – the Food and Agriculture Organization and Charles Sturt University – to implement a project seeking to enhance biodiversity services in irrigation systems of Southeast Asia.

This project is part of the Regional Initiative on Water Scarcity launched by FAO in 2013 to support the countries of the NENA region (Near East and North Africa) to address two of their most urgent challenges: food security and water security for sustainable economic and social development in a context of water scarcity.

Livelihoods across a large portion of sub-Saharan Africa are dependent upon rainfed agriculture, with only a small percentage of arable land benefiting from irrigation. Agricultural growth has been constrained by the pressures placed on land through rapid population growth, migration, displacement caused by localized conflict, price volatility, desertification and flooding, among other factors.

Although cholera is endemic in Yemen, the last few years has seen infections spike to a scale not witnessed in living memory. Lack of maintenance of water infrastructure, plus aquifer depletion, are largely to blame.

In the Indus River Basin, agriculture employs nearly 26 percent of Pakistan’s labour force and produces more than 90 percent of the country’s agriculture outputs. However, extended droughts and floods have affected millions of people in recent years.

The project for Food Security by Enhancing Climate Resilience and Ecosystem Management aims to develop an Integrated Land-Use Planning (ILUP) approach through capacity development of relevant institutions, to establish stakeholder engagement process, and to strengthen the relevant land information infrastructure in a cost-effective way.

Southern St. Elizabeth is a highly agriculturally productive parish in Jamaica. However, the parish is prone to dry spells, prolonged drought, high temperatures during summer months and high winds. Farmers have built resilience to drought by using soil mulch (Guinea grass) and labour-intensive hand watering.

The Syrian crisis that started in 2012 has led to land abandonment and the displacement of large swathes of the rural population, with a resulting deterioration in soil conditions and, more generally, the agricultural sector and national economy. This initiative aims to restore essential capacity for sustainable natural-resource planning and management.

Over the 2010 – 2011 period and beyond, FAO, in partnership with the Government of Jamaica embarked on an initiative entitled Promoting rainwater harvesting and small-scale irrigation in South Saint Elizabeth,

The world’s population is growing rapidly and concentrating in urban centres. This trend is particularly intense in developing countries, where an additional 2.1 billion people are expected to be living in cities by 2030. However, sanitation coverage (collection and treatment) is not keeping pace with urban growth and as a result most wastewater enters water courses untreated.