Claire Warmenbol
is Communications Officer for the IUCN Water Programme. Prior to this position she coordinated the Tales of Water project, a global multimedia campaign focusing on water and children. At IUCN, Claire work ed as media and press officer for the Global Communications and Marine programmes. Claire holds a BA in environmental and development studies from the University of Melbourne, Australia. She also worked on environmental projects in Southern Africa, China, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Prior to joining the IUCN European office as a consultant for the biodiversity Countdown 2010 Campaign, Claire worked for the European Environment Bureau and the United Nations in Brussels. This blog has originally been published on the {http://www.iucn.org/about/work/programmes/water/?13832/Blog-All-hands-to-the-pump-nexus-lessons-and-solutions-from-Bogota|IUCN website} and is republished here by courtesy of IUCN. #box So, the Bogotà meeting, another workshop you may think? Not so. What sets these Nexus workshops apart is that firstly, participants come from a wide variety of sectors. Hence, no preaching to the choir, but rather a colourful ensemble of participants with different company interests and agendas... but all with the same aspiration: keeping water flowing and healthy. For example, a river basin manager found himself working out future water scenarios with a hydropower engineer from an electrical company and a farmers' representative from a grassroots network. Had these people met before? Not necessarily. Yet they face the same issues and seek answers to similar questions: "What ways of operating dams sustain wetland fisheries?", "What technologies make irrigation more efficient?", "How are water trade-offs negotiated", etc. Secondly, the nexus workshops are more like visionary brainstorm sessions. No long speeches or extensive Powerpoint presentations. The engineer, farmer, corporate manager, basin expert, all work together solving water challenges, and through that, discover the concerns and solutions existing in other sectors, be it agriculture, energy, biodiversity... for some, an eye-opener. Following a fictional basin exercise developed by the IUCN Environmental Law Centre, groups worked on nexus issues related to existing river basins such as the Magdalena in Colombia and the Paranaiba in Brazil. You only have to look at the Global Electricity Outlook to realise the unabated growth of energy and use of hydropower in those regions (and worldwide) to sit up and pay attention. One of the lessons from the Bogotà workshop has shown that scale is important — the influence of different sectors may not be understood at different scales in river basin management approaches. Only through dialogue across the different sectors can these influences be identified jointly. The conventional approach has been to develop integrated water resource management plans, often in the absence of the sectors that have the most influence, such as energy and agriculture. Understanding this, and developing policy recommendations that address this, will be key in creating new pathways for the nexus. You might wonder where all this may lead to? The Nexus Dialogue on Infrastructure Solutions will culminate in an International Conference on Water, Food and Energy, to take place in Beijing in 2014. Recommendations and solutions pooled from these workshops, as well as from the Nexus toolkit and research, will frame the conference agenda and aim to influence water infrastructure planning in the future.