Author(s): David Hetherington; Minni Jain; Louise Bingham And Candelaria Lucero
Linked Author(s): David Hetherington
Keywords: Community Drought Climate Flood Nature SDGs Groundwater
Abstract: Community driven, decentralised water management is an effective way to decrease global water woes and deliver environmental, social and economic resilience. With ~3.2 billion people living with water shortages, there is a critical need to upskill communities in resilient and sustainable local water management. Arup, The Flow Partnership and WaterAid teamed up to deliver the WaterUp project to address this challenge; this project produced universally accessible educational materials to manage water in semi-arid climates. This involved extensive research on existing work undertaken in Rajasthan, India, over the last four decades by the community-led organisation ‘Tarun Bharat Sangh’ (TBS). TBS work with communities to build traditional, sustainable, and resilient water management features known as Johads which capture and store seasonal rainfall to tackle flood and drought risk. WaterUp learnt from this traditional knowledge to construct new johads in India, recording the process to enable others to replicate the work. A language-neutral educational film was then produced and tested with communities in India and Colombia to ensure applicability to a variety of geographies, cultures and environments globally. As part of the ongoing project legacy, a physical premises for Water School India is being built in Madhya Pradesh. Additionally, the construction of a ‘Jaguey’ (which has the same function as a Johad) is now being monitored in Colombia and being used as a case study to stimulate further similar work in the area. This paper reinforces the power and potential of community driven water management as a means of climate change adaptation and societal improvement, whilst reporting on ongoing efforts to stimulate similar work in India, Colombia and elsewhere in the world.
Year: 2025