Despite the need to think across sectors, scientific, policy and professional communities are still organised through sectoral and disciplinary structures. Water Future will develop an interface between and within these communities, explicitly focusing on the formulation and transmission of messages related to the role of water, its governance and management, and the transformations in other sectors, such as energy and agriculture.
Dialogue implies learning on both sides, with policymakers and planners requiring information relating to water problems and sustainable solutions, and scientists striving to learn more about the urgent problems of society and the information needed to solve them.
The Science-Policy-Dialogue will be achieved by:
- Bringing together academic, practitioner and policy experts from different countries to study complex water issues and generate planning and decision alternatives;
- Creating a web-based platform to engage in dialogue with the public and private sectors as well as Non-Governmental Organisation (NGOs), as the basis for a dynamic communication structure;
- Engaging a broad community of stakeholders, including management agencies, NGOs and industry partners in identifying and crafting innovative and lasting solutions to regional water challenges;
- Providing better information-sharing on critical water issues through summarizing research outputs for decision makers, subsequently opening them for discussion within a broader audience;
- Engaging decision- and policy-makers to gain their inputs in water research, for instance in the formulation of future scenarios, the discussion of results with the policy partners and the further iterative re-design of those scenarios; and
- Promoting water science literacy to media, as well as disseminating research through wider international global media outreach.
Dialogue
- Water Future played a lead role in organising and convening the Science Forum at the Budapest Water Summit 2016 which took place during November 28-30th. The summit was hosted by the Hungarian Government in cooperation with the World Water Council, under the patronage of János Áder, President of Hungary in November. The mission of the summit was to position water, not as a source of conflict and global risk, but as a source of cooperation, peace and development for all the countries committed to sustainable development.
Further Information: Event | Conference Highlights | Forum Report | Side Event Report