DAY4 - Thursday 24th of March

Central Asia - an extensive, landlocked region of Asia. The region includes the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Republic of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and the Republic of Uzbekistan. According to the latest UN estimations, the current population of Central Asia is more than 75.1 million people - this is about 1% of the total population of the Earth.

The session aims first to address the Water-Peace-Security nexus in the West and Central African context. Also, it aims to present the main achievements of the DEP initiative since its official launch in 2019; the session will serve as an opportunity to exchange on the main future strategic orientations of the DEP in terms of think tank on the water-peace-development nexus. To this end, the session will aim to explore the possibilities of setting up the follow-up mechanism of the WEF recommendations in concert with the Dakar Water Forum Secretariat.

The objective of this session is to discuss SfN adapted to the Senegalese context and allowing to support the concepts of green growth or green economy in order to reduce the impacts of climate change on the sustainable use of water resources. The panel will present and deepen :
- Challenges and issues related to climate change on water resources in Senegal - Water security and the concept of circular water economy
- Natural solutions to increase resilience to the impacts of climate change

The "Dakar 2021 Initiative" aims, during the preparatory phase of the Forum, to select, label and popularize relevant, innovative, structuring and replicable national, regional and international projects, producing short-term results with a sustainable impact around the Forum's priorities, and whose purpose is to contribute to the acceleration of the achievement of the SDGs, and more particularly of SDG6.
The Dakar 2022 Initiative is the materialization of the vision: "From commitment to implementation of concrete actions on the ground".

The "Dakar 2021 Initiative" aims, during the preparatory phase of the Forum, to select, label and popularize relevant, innovative, structuring and replicable national, regional and international projects, producing short-term results with a sustainable impact around the Forum's priorities, and whose purpose is to contribute to the acceleration of the achievement of the SDGs, and more particularly of SDG6.
The Dakar 2022 Initiative is the materialization of the vision: "From commitment to implementation of concrete actions on the ground".

The session aims to present water as a key element without which none of the
problems associated with global changes will be resolved: combating desertification, resilience to change climate and epidemic prevention. The session also aims to discuss how it is possible to revive, in some form or another, the Climate is water initiative, so as to produce, by the community, and in the shortest possible time, (from preferably in view of COP 27) a series of synthetic but unified messages, to be transmitted to external partners, and to broadcast during major international events.

The reuse of wastewater has become an increasing trend over time as it’s one of the main non-conventional water resources. Moreover, maximizing freshwater use efficiently is needed to cope with water scarcity.

The scarcity of water resources is a phenomenon that is intensifying under the effect of the strong pressure on water and climate change impacting mainly the most vulnerable rural communities. The latter are dependent on water resources for their socio-economic activities.
Moreover, the real needs of the vulnerable rural population are not really taken into account and sufficiently represented in the decision-making process concerning hydro-agricultural investment projects and territorial development.

The session aims to explore innovative ways of generating and sharing practical knowledge on integrated water resource management (IWRM) among a wide range of stakeholders across sectors and scales. It will highlight concrete water and climate solutions brought by different groups that have proven to be sustainable in the countries and sectors where they were implemented (e.g., in food security, social inclusion, transboundary cooperation, etc.). In an interactive way, it will dissect some of those cases to allow the participants to reach conclusions and recommendations jointly.

The Mediterranean and the Sahel are among the poorest regions of the world in terms of fresh water, which leads them to use other types of water than lakes, rivers and aquifers, and which are therefore called non-conventional water resources: wastewater, which is treated to be reused, and salt water or marine water, which is desalinated. These mobilizations are developing rapidly in view of demographics and global warming, but at the cost of sharply rising energy consumption that runs counter to climate objectives.