Welcome to our dedicated page for the Water Innovation Project, a groundbreaking initiative that the IDG Water Network is currently working on with its partners. The project is part of our general mission to combine scientific knowledge and inner wisdom for building a water conscious society to achieve thriving communities and ecosystems in harmony with nature.
Scientific Knowledge +
Inner Wisdom =
Water Conscious Society
Below, you’ll find the concept note of the Water Innovation Project, offering an in-depth look at the project’s objectives, methods, and anticipated impacts as well as a list of the initial project partners.
Additionally, if you are interested in collaborating or have questions, please fill out the contact form below. We look forward to connecting with partners who share our vision and want to work with us on the Water Innovation Project.
Concept Note
Background and Vision
Water is a natural resource most critical in very different aspects, crucial for life, and especially indispensable for its demand across sectors and borders. Due to its crucial role, water resources management is also a core element of emissions mitigation, climate adaption, and transformation strategies. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 6) has the objective to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and water sanitation for all”. However, according to the latest Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024, only 17 percent of the SDG targets are on track. Water remains a challenge in manyfold aspects, especially considering that water touches on most of the 17 SDGs. It has huge impacts due to a changing climate, higher population density, and consequently, higher demands on natural resources, affecting States, Regions, and Societies.
Water availability, water quality and especially aquatic ecosystems have long been under stress worldwide – mostly due to a human-centered use of catchment areas and water bodies. Due to changing climate conditions, the challenges in the water sector are increasing rapidly, which could currently be seen in drastic cases around the world. This causes adverse environmental impacts and extreme floods, droughts, and heat waves in every region of the world, all of which has a high impact on the economic and social living conditions.
To be resilient and mitigate the adverse environmental impacts of a changing climate, people need to be informed and use that information to act and contribute with meaningful actions. This will help mitigate emissions and overcome the many challenges by adapting to the impacts of climate change. They should also be aware of a reasonable and equitable utilization of water resources, bearing in mind the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystem (WEFE) Nexus. Transformative change of water management will benefit societies, rivers, and their catchments areas. Rivers have multiple uses, and through our watercourses we connect upstream with downstream areas, rural with urban areas, countries, regions and whole continents. Thus, achieving a balance among these multiple uses and to consider the WEFE Nexus is crucial.
We further need to complement the progress from sustainable and integrated water resources management, climate change adaption and mitigation efforts, transboundary water cooperation, technical innovations, with a systemic and wide transformative application of this knowledge. This is done by incorporating the need for fundamental change in habits and accustomed comfort levels, for example by considering the Inner Development Goals (IDG) framework. The IDG Framework is able to guide necessary transformation in a step-by-step approach in order to build the future solutions on a solid foundation. This foundation includes openness, integrity, empathy, trust, appreciation, courage, optimism, and perseverance to create solutions that finally make the difference to all stakeholders.
A collaborative work and partnerships of all stakeholders is crucial for sustainable water management — from local over regional to international spatial scales. In this process, we strive for long-term sustainable solutions by “thinking outside the box”, namely consider both top-down and bottom-up aspects to build comprehensive and long-lasting solutions. The Water Innovation Project leads to a path of collective action, in order to bring balance in the utilization of water resources. It is to address and respect the different intergenerational and multi-sectorial interests, while safeguarding a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, where people can live in harmony with one another and with nature.
Objectives
Water resources are vital for our existence. We want to build a future where all people have information about the water resources that are a crucial part of their shared environment. We care about how to use that information to improve their living conditions, in a way that brings about efficient, equitable, and sustainable utilization of water resources. In short: we want a future in which water, and thus people, are protected and cared for.
IDGs for SDGs in the water sector denote the need for a fundamental shift in addressing current and future challenges related to sustainable water resources management that cannot be achieved with “traditional” approaches and solutions only. Classical integrated water resources management, based on solutions and adaption measures within known frameworks and conscious and unconscious limits, will not be enough for the future – as it has not and cannot achieve the necessary social change.
By aligning both a top-down (e.g., International legal frameworks for transboundary water management and integrated water resources management) and a bottom-up approach (Inner transformation from individuals over communities to whole societies – IDGs), the project intends to provide a framework to facilitate and accelerate change. The project will highlight enabling factors that tackle the needed technical and financial (revenue raising, costs secured in national budgets) change. It will also highlight the challenges in sustainable water management and consideration of water in climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts, as well as political commitments at national, regional and global level. The Project will develop approaches where visions of systemic change in water management for both mankind and nature will be developed by looking in detail into the personal and intrapersonal connections with water and the corresponding web of life.
Case studies and applications
The project should include case studies as concrete applications of this framework for enabling factors to bring solutions and accelerate and facilitate change, namely e.g.,
- A Water project of the city of Bangalore led by the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board focusing on how to address the water related needs of the city
- The water project of GESI focusing on how digital technology can be leveraged to address water related challenge
- River bathing in the Neckar and Drinking water production from the Kinzigtal dam to address the complex urban-rural interactions of water related challenges
Expected Outcome
- Creation of a top-down and bottom-up framework, including this holistic approach to the water challenges.
- Concrete applications of the project’s framework into sustainably innovations with water resources management experts and aligned with modern needs and requirements. The innovations and solutions will be accompanied by innovative financial instruments and business models, as well as products from the culture and creative industry to foster the transformational change and policy innovations.
- Publications
Target Audience
- Governments, official state representatives,
- Municipalities, regional authorities,
- Companies, industries,
- Civil society, International community
- Academia, UGIH Partners, etc.
Initial Project Partners
- United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat
- International Law Institute, University of Bonn
- Inner Development Goals Initiative; IDG Köln/ Bonn Area Community Hub
- Klaus Mertens, IDG/ UN FCCC GIH Engagement & Alliance Lead
- Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences, Germany
- IDG Water Network
Impact Gardens from the IDG Summit 2024
For the water workshops at the IDG Summit 2024 we translated the idea of the Water Innovation Project into a so-called Impact Garden.
During the IDG Summit 2024 we’ve worked with several awesome groups to refine the idea of the Water Innovation project — the results of the developed Impact Gardens are shown below.
We are currently working on integrating all the valuable input from the IDG Summit 2024 into a version 2 of the concept note.
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