Water Solutions

Wild and Scenic Rivers

International Rivers knows from experience that even once it has been stopped, a proposed dam can resurface under a new name, design or location, posing an ongoing threat to unique ecosystems and local populations. Stopping one project is no guarantee that it won’t pop up somewhere else, under a different name. Now, International Rivers is exploring ways to make permanent river conservation in Chile, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador a legal reality. Why now? Rivers in these countries are increasingly being targeted by dam-builders, who view them as resources to be exploited for electricity and irr

Rainwater Harvesting Pioneer Wins International Water Prize

Rajendra Singh
Through his life's work, the new Stockholm Water Prize Laureate Rajendra Singh has shown that bottom-up approaches are the best way to manage water, droughts and floods.

Rainwater Harvesting Pioneer Wins International Water Prize

Rajendra Singh
Through his life's work, the new Stockholm Water Prize Laureate Rajendra Singh has shown that bottom-up approaches are the best way to manage water, droughts and floods.

Chasing Water: New Book Lays Out Better Path for Water

Thursday, May 29, 2014
Brian Richter is a water expert with decades of global field experience, a passion for rivers, and a scientist’s approach to problem solving. His new book Chasing Water (Island Press) takes a hard look at what we need to do to improve water management in a time of dwindling resources. The following excerpt lays out some key principals for getting us there. Hundreds of books and thousands of technical papers have been written on the subject of water management, and yet so many communities continue to crash into the wall of scarcity. We urgently need to design, experiment with, and give life

Big Dreams, Small (and Clever) Projects

DWC helped implement this solar pumping station in Ethiopia.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
From March 2012 World Rivers ReviewDWC helped implement this solar pumping station in Ethiopia. Oliver Kopsch is a clean-energy enabler. His company, DecRen Water Consult (DWC), based in Germany, designs decentralized water systems powered by renewable energies. We talked to Oliver about his approach, and lessons learned from some recent projects. The business model.We are a private commercial company, based in Germany. We started about 10 years ago, after a few of us came to the conclusion that we weren’t doing what we were meant to do. We started by selling solar desalination products,

Adapting to a New Normal

The Aral Sea – a global poster-child of bad water management – once supported a major fishery until dams and irrigation diversions drained it.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
From September 2010 World Rivers Review When it comes to water, the past is no longer a reliable guide to the future Water, like energy, is essential to virtually every human endeavor. The growing number of water shortages around the world and the possibility of these shortages leading to economic disruption, food crises, social tensions, and even war suggest that the challenges posed by water in the coming decades will rival those posed by declining oil supplies. In fact, our water problem turns out to be much more worrisome than our energy situation, for three main reasons. First, unlike o

Water for All

Poor water access particularly affects women and girls
Poor water access particularly affects women and girls Photo: JA! Inequitable access to water, especially for growing crops, is a major factor in global poverty, and a death sentence for millions each year. Ending this unacceptable situation will require a radically new approach to investing in water infrastructure. The major engineering works that dominated 20th century water management has been discounted for its technical and economic failures, for benefiting the well-off at the expense of the poor, and for its massively negative impacts on ecosystems. Water mismanagement contributes towar

Spreading the Water Wealth: Making Water Infrastructure Work for the Poor

Monday, March 13, 2006
International Rivers’s first annual "Dams, Rivers and People" report analyzes the links between water and poverty reduction, and argues for new approaches to water management that are pro–poor and environmentally sustainable. The Grim Statistics of Water More than 1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water. More than 2 million children die each year due to dirty water and poor sanitation. Hundreds of millions of small farmers on arid lands are mired in extreme poverty. A Failed Approach The water strategies of the World Bank and most governments focus on large–scale dams and
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