The Asia and the Pacific Water Resilience Hub is an open platform dedicated to strengthening water security in the region by establishing partnerships; providing training opportunities; and developing and sharing knowledge products, innovative methods, tools, data, and digital technologies.
It brings together water experts, policy makers, resource managers, and water implementers to collectively address water resilience to enable countries and water entities better weather and prepare for natural hazards, climate change, water insecurity, and social and economic crises.
- Curated tools and resources. The Water Resilience Hub provides a comprehensive and centralized repository of the best-proven and most accessible solutions and tools to address water entities’ needs in establishing projects and systems that build towards resilience, including locally applicable emerging digital solutions and technologies. It offers information on the latest initiatives and knowledge products from the Asian Development Bank’s Water Sector Group. It also supplies critical materials related to achieving global commitments, such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement.
- Region-specific knowledge. The Water Resilience Hub offers information and resources tailored for the Asia and Pacific region’s needs and opportunities in water security and resilience. It provides the context-specific solutions needed to assess resiliency and advance water efforts at the conceptualization, implementation, and policy provision stages. It also offers adaptive planning and diagnostic tools to support local water utilities and resource managers, as well as up-to-date guidance to meet compliance requirements and regulations in water programming and services.
- Global connection. The Water Resilience Hub strategically links Asia and the Pacific water players into the latest developments and approaches in the water sector at large. It harvests knowledge and financing prospects from around the world and connects water entities to each other for peer-to-peer learning, as well as to sector experts through resilience training and upskilling opportunities. The Hub is designed to avoid duplicating effort or recreating what exists. Its focus is to allow water utilities, policy makers, and resource managers to work smarter and more effectively by collating and highlighting the best tools and resources on offer in one smart system, accessible to all.
- Personalized support. The Water Resilience Hub provides customized assistance through targeted training modules and partnership opportunities. Training will be offered through the Hub in conjunction with renowned water organizations on a rolling basis. Using the new generation of partnership programming from the Asian Development Bank, twinning partnerships will be provided to help water organizations tackle climate change risks and other threats.
Asia and the Pacific is one of the most water-scarce regions in the world. It has 60% of the world’s population but only 36% of its water resources. The region is also the most vulnerable to natural hazards, accounting for 57% of fatalities and 88% of people affected as a result of these events since 1970. This vulnerability is compounded by climate change—with growing impacts on local economies, communities, and the environment—as well as by the continued effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and sustained pressures on water security and access throughout the region.
Building holistic resilience is the best way to combat and reduce these threats. Resilience means "to bounce back." When applied to water, it refers to water systems and services that can weather and recover from shocks while remaining adaptable to—and prepared for—an uncertain future. Water resilience goes beyond climate uncertainty, extreme weather events, and even pandemics. Water resilience means water entities and partners are prepared to thrive amid all challenges, including social and inequality issues, instability, and financing constraints.
A major untapped opportunity to build resilience is through digitalization. The adoption of technology has been frustratingly slow in the water sector, despite evidence of the success of digital solutions across a wide range of applications. Water ranks one of the lowest in digitalization uptake among development sectors. The Asia and the Pacific Water Resilience Hub provides specific entryways for water entities and partners to build towards sustainable and inclusive water resilience and security for the region.
The Water Resilience Hub is a functional resource platform for all regional water entities and partners. It is designed to serve the needs of water utilities, water resource and irrigation managers, and policy makers and regulators. The Hub also serves as an interface for training centers, think tanks, research centers and academic institutions, and development and financing partners to collaborate in promoting water security and resilience for Asia and the Pacific.
Water entities and partners have access to training opportunities, discussion forums, and resources focused on resilience and adaptive capacity, inclusiveness and gender equality, environmental sustainability and circular economy, governance and finance, and innovation and technology.
The Water Resilience Hub’s resources are structured around five guiding principles for building comprehensive and sustainable resilience:
Each section contains summaries of the tools, knowledge products, and training materials on offer and their relevance to the technical aspects of resilience in water provision or programming, along with quick links to the resources.
The Hub’s learning repository is also searchable by applicable user — such as irrigation management entities or coastal authorities — and resource type. In addition, the Hub has a region- and country-specific learning page featuring innovative and context-tailored solutions.