Water Resources Assessment - Handbook for Review of National Capabilities

Water Resources Assessment is a national responsibility and therefore it is important that countries be self sufficient in their ability to undertake it. A first step towards this goal is to enable a country’s to review and evaluate the extent to which it is capable of undertaking WRA, whether its material, human and financial resources and the institutional and legal framework in which they operate are adequate to this task.  To this purpose a “Handbook for review of national capabilities” for WRA has been developed by a team of international experts under the joint leadership of WMO and UNESCO.

The scope of the handbook is to provide guidance for the review of basic WRA programmes: it focuses on the collection, processing and retrieval of basic hydrological, hydrometeorological and physiographic data; regionalization techniques; personnel, education and training; research and development; information needs for planning purposes. The manual however does not cover assessment of water supply and demand scenarios as this would require comprehensive consideration of economic and social factors, which are often beyond the mandate of NHSs. The effectiveness of the methodology was tested in pilot projects by numerous countries (Australia, Germany, Ghana, Malaysia, Panama, Romania and Sweden).

To introduce and promote the methodology described in the Handbook and encourage its implementation, various training workshops have been organized targeted to experts from NHSs in different regions, namely:

La Habana, Cuba, 2-3 July 2007
Bogotá, Colombia, 14-16 February 2006
Niamey, Niger, 1-3 November 2005
Tashkent, Uzbekistan 20-22 September 2000
Cairo, Egypt, 1-5 December 1999
Nadi, Fiji, 29 September – 2 October 1999
Lilongwe, Malawi, 6-9 July 1998