Share, Strategize, & Scale Up actions for coping with water scarcity: Lessons from the Regional Technical Workshop on Water Scarcity

Since 2019, the FAO’s Water Scarcity Programme (WSP) has been active across the Asia and Pacific region, focusing on six countries to strengthen their capacity to manage water scarcity. While each nation faces distinct challenges, many issues cut across borders. To confront these shared concerns, FAO is fostering a regional collaborative platform where countries can exchange knowledge, share experiences, and collaborate on solutions to today’s—and tomorrow’s—water scarcity challenges. 

On 25–26 March 2024, FAO convened the Regional Technical Workshop on Water Scarcity in Bangkok, bringing together 60 experts from diverse fields to review WSP progress and co-design its next phase. Participants comprised country representatives from Lao PDR, Thailand, Cambodia, Viet Nam and Indonesia, international experts, and WSP Phase I donors. Attendees were acquainted through the role-playing game, Wat’Count, which simulates the difficulties of managing water allocation systems amid personal incentives and raise awareness on the benefit of using water accounting to inform allocation decisions. Throughout the remainder of the workshop, countries presented their WSP progress reviewing national strategies, role of national multidisciplinary teams, findings from water accounting roadmap development and water tenure assessments. Breakout groups brainstormed priorities for their respective Water Scarcity Action Plans (WSAPs) and the Regional Collaborative Platform.    

From the workshop, participating country representatives exemplified the desire to:

• Continually integrate and improve water accounting tools, 
• Further investigate water tenure and the type of rights and access,
• Build cross-sectoral coordination for data sharing and analysis, and
• Establish regional, standardized water accounting building blocks, using strong pilot basin studies as concrete examples. 

However, these goals are underpinned by the need for adequate, continual funding and technical guidance to develop, implement, and scale up national WSAPs.  Hence, it is imperative to remember that water scarcity, though manifested in diverse forms, is not an isolated experience. As the Asia-Pacific region confronts the growing challenges of seasonal floods and droughts, pollution, and water overextraction, the need for collaboration – through knowledge sharing, technical capacity building, and financial support – remains persistent.