Achievements, Challenges & Lessons Learned

Regional Coordination on Improved Water Resources

Management and Capacity Building Program

(RCIWRC)

Final Seminar of the “ ReGoKo” (GEF Grant)

16-129-30 Sep, 2015

• Regional Project Overview

• Project Components

• Completion Status and End-users Applications

• Overall Project Implementation Progress

• Project Results Indicators

• Phase I Challenges

• Lessons learned

• Recommendations

Presentation 2 Outline • Regional Component Arab Water Council Role

Presentation 1 Outline

• Fresh Water Scarcity in MENA Region is more and more a challenge that is affecting the development of the region. MENA is among the most fresh-water scarce regions in the world.

• The MENA region is vulnerable to climate change, significant dependence on climate-sensitive agriculture and high concentrations of both population and economic activity in flood-prone urban coastal zones. (IPCC) models predict that temperature and water variability will increase in several countries of the region with water precipitation predicted to drop by up to 30% by 2050.

Main Challenges in MENA

• Time to address theses challenges using the Utilized Earth Science and satellite observations in conjunction with ground measurements, remote sensing tools and models to examine scientific questions and address water resources issues, understand and adapt to climate change impacts for decision making and societal benefits.

• In June 2008, AWC, World Bank, representatives from most of the Arab League countries, USAID, NASA, ICBA supported this idea by Implementing the “Regional Coordination On improved Water Resources Management and Capacity Building Program”

Use of RS in Water and Agriculture Management

• This Program is a multi-country Adaptable Program (APL) financed under a Global Environment Facility (GEF) Grant, to finance the technical assistance , hardware and software infrastructure required to build the capacity of the involved governments to improve local and regional water resources and agricultural management using earth observation tools.

• Project Total Budget : 5.644 US$M

Regional Project overview

Regional Project overview

Project approval date: Phase 1 (Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco & Tunisia) : June 9, 2011 Phase 2 (Egypt): July 17, 2012

Project closing date: Phase 1 (Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco & Tunisia) : May 31, 2015 Phase 2 (Egypt): November 30, 2016

Phase 1 of the APL supports activities in Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and AWC. Phase 2 of the APL is supporting the same activities in Egypt through National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Science (NARSS), and will be triggered upon the Government of Egypt’s

readiness.

Regional Project overview

Improve water resources and agricultural management across

beneficiary countries based on quantitative and spatial -based making

tools of remote sensing.

Objective

Through Number of major water resources & agriculture development

decisions made, taking into consideration WISP

3 PDOs:

1. WISP operational in at least 3 of 4 implementing agencies;

2. Number of major water resources decisions made taking into consideration WISP tools; &

3. Regional project data portal developed and operational (according to GEF International Waters (IW): LEARN guidelines).

Your own sub headline

Regional Coordination Program ( RCIWRM)

A Unique Collaboration aims to bring cutting edge technologies to water

resources planning, policy and management discussions

Egypt Lebanon Morocco Jordan Tunisia

Implementing partners in APL1

MOROCCO

PMU:

CRTS

End-users:

DRPE/ DRE/ SHG

TUNISIA

PMU:

CRTEAN

End-users: National Center of

cartography & remote

sensing

General directorate of

water resource

National institute of

meteorology

General directorate of

rural engineering and

water exploitation

general directorate of

agriculture

JORDAN

PMU:

Ministry of Water

and Irrigation

(MWI)

End-users: Royal Geographic

Centre, Jordan.

National Center of

Agriculture (NCARE),

Jordan.

LEBANON

PMU:

CNRS

End-users: LARI / GDGA / Civil

defense

University/ Meteo

service

Ministry of

Environment

Ministry of Agriculture

Litani authority/CLEA-

CNRS

Implementing Partners & Users

Country Implementing Organization User Organizations Involved

Egypt NARSS - National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences

MWRI (Agri & Hyd)

Meteorology Academia

Jordan MW&I - Ministry of Water and Irrigation

Regional offices (Water Mgmt)

Meteorology NCARE (Agri & Drought), Academia

RJGC - Royal Jordan Geographic Center

Lebanon CNRS - The National Center for Remote Sensing

Agriculture Meteorology Disaster Mgmt

Morocco CRTS - The Royal Center for Remote Sensing

Agriculture Meteorology & Hydrology

Regional Water Offices

Tunisia CRTEAN -The Regional Centre for Remote sensing of the States of North Africa

Regional Organization with Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia. Egypt and Sudan

CNCT - Centre National de la Cartographie et de la Teledetection

Agriculture Meteorology and Hydrology

Ground Water, Academia

AWC Arab Water Council Regional Water Coordinating Council – 22 Nations, serves as WISP coordinator for the World Bank

UAE International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA)

International Agriculture research center – works closely with NASA GSFC to utilize NASA data products and models

Project Components

3

Overall Coordination and Monitoring of project progress and implementation aspects

Implementation of a regional project Portal and organizations of regional workshops and trainings.

Preparation of regional project implementation progress report and Project monitoring & evaluation

reports.

Integration of National drought results into one regional drought Report.

Regional Integration and Cooperation (394,595 USD)

Agreed technical models developed and transferred to each country

Application of modeling results by technical line agencies/stakeholders

Improved Local Water Resources and Agricultural Management (3.6 M USD) 1

Number of researchers and stakeholders trained under the project (oversea & local )

Number of TA/consultant services provided by NASA/ICBA team

Establishment of an online national portal to share data across stakeholder institutions

Capacity Building and Project Management (1.3 M USD) 2

• Technical assistance provided for all country PMUs since the project was effective;

• Transfer of high tech tools to the countries upon specific needs;

• Technical Project Implementation plans (PIP) and the training programs were discussed and drafted by NASA, AWC and PMU.

• Technical support also provided by other affiliated academic partners and NASA’s Consultants Ex. University of Nebraska, University of Wisconsin, ICBA, CIMA Organization and others…….

NASA’s Technical Support

National Priorities Per country

RS Applications Egypt Jordan Tunisia Lebanon Morocco

Evapotranspiration

Drought Monitoring

Floods Detection and Modeling

Climate Change Impact

Crop Mapping & Irrigation

Crop Yield Predictions

Hydrological Modeling and Analysis

Locust Monitoring

Forest Fires Forecasting

Jordan, Use of RS results in

revealing major water theft in Amman and amendment the “Law of Groundwater”.

“Ministry Seeks NASA’s Help to Reveal Major Water Theft”. AMMAN — Through using satellite remote sensing techniques in collaboration with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), authorities have uncovered a major case of water theft, Ministry of Water and Irrigation announced Monday. The ministry has discovered an illegal 1.5km pipe linked to a major water conveyer in the Tneib region in south Amman, through which the main suspect had been allegedly diverting 1,200 cubic metres from public water supplies daily to his farm, a ministry statement said.

Lebanon, Launching the

Platform of "Sustainable Natural Resources Management and Early warning system XDAs

Morocco, Launching the Platform of

"Sustainable Natural Resources Management and Early warning system XDAs. Assisting Moroccan CNLAA in field prospection programming, operational tool for prevention fighting of Locust.

Beneficiary: The « Poste de Coordination Central de la Lutte Anti Acridienne » (PCCLAA) : Decisional and coordinator organ for the locust control at national Level. Developed an operationally Production and Dissemination System of Environmental parameters for Locust Monitoring operationally Production System of Locust risk maps covering the Moroccan area was set. Risk map covering recent period was already exploited by our national partner to manage its field prospection operations

AWC Regional Component 3

World Bank

Egypt NARSS

Morocco CRTS

Tunisia CNCT

Lebanon CNRS

Jordan MWI

NASA Goddard

USAID

ICBA

AWC

JHU UW USDA SSAI

U of Alabama

NASA

$

Implementation, Products and Project Management

ICBA Tasks

Coordination

Management and Implementation Complexities

RJGC

CRTEAN

ICBA research

20

• To enhance international communication and cooperation among implementing agencies/stakeholder through regional trainings and Workshops,

• To Enable effective cooperation among regional partners and ensuring that regional opportunities for improved water resources management are effectively captured, documented and communicated to all regional stakeholders through Progress reports, meetings, and supervision missions.

• To Conduct a regional study based on the outcomes of the national research on Climate Change (Drought Assessment ).

• To catalyze the regional dissemination of the project Outputs/Outcomes,

Role of the Arab Water Council

Three Main Pillars for Component 3

Project Reviews

•To monitor project implementation as a whole,

•Organize and conduct project status Meetings and progress reviews as needed,

•Develop review agenda,

•Develop project overall progress reports, and Monitoring & Evaluation/ Reports,

• Integrate regional final report.

Ensuring of End-Users Engagement

•To ensure that the end users organizations are benefiting and making use the end products, tools, and outputs, and that the applications and tools are being developed in cooperation with the end users organizations,

•To suggest and develop sets of indicators and goals required to implement the end-user engagement process .

Regional Capacity Building and

Knowledge Exchange

•To assist in recommending and selecting types, methods and experts needed for regional Workshops, training and knowledge exchange events,

•To Organize and regional workshops and trainings as needed.

•Developed regional portal for disseminating and integrating project information,

•To coordinate and follow-up on similar or related studies and research work of common interest carried out by other implementing authorities outside of this project.

1. Regional Technical Workshop in Dubai

(Progress Update), UAE May 2013,

2. The Regional Procurement/Financial Training

in Amman, Jordan December 2013,

3. The Regional Remote Sensing Training on

The Use Of Remote Sensing in Agriculture,

Jordan,June 2014.

4. The Regional Workshop for

Evapotranspiration ET Management, Cairo,

October 2014.

5. 3rd AWF Regional Session, Cairo, Dec 2014.

6. The Regional Workshop for Groundwater

Management, Tunisia , April 2015.

7. The Regional Closing Workshop for RCIWRM

Project, Cairo May 2015.

Regional Achievements

The Regional Workshop for Evapotranspiration

ET Management, Cairo, October 2014

The Regional Workshop at the 3rd AWF

Dec, 2014

The Regional Workshop For Groundwater

Managemnet , Tunisia April, 2015

• Represented an excellent opportunity and step forward in improving regional communication, coordination and addressing issues impacting the vital sustainable resources.

• To review current practices, Identify areas unique to each country.

• Discuss and identify technical issues which were common to the region.

• International Experts were invited to present the latest state of the art in the RS field and worked directly with PMUs and stakeholders in groups in identifying areas needed for improvement and defining the way forward.

• Recommendations on the national and regional level were documented and later shared between countries.

• During 3rd AWF session a MOU was signed between AWC and CREAN to start a partnership to enhance the regional activities in remote sensing across MENA.

AWC Regional Workshops Outcomes

2nd Regional Supervision Mission

( Amman, Dec, 2013)

Regional Supervision Missions

1st Regional Supervision Mission ( In- field ) to Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon

(April 2013)

4th Regional Supervision Mission

( Cairo, Oct, 2014)

Regional Supervision Missions

3st Regional (MTR)Mission (Morocco, April 2014)

• The opportunity to meet and organize a series of meetings with all country PMUs, partners and project related end-users (from the technical line ministries).

• Discussion of the current status of the project progress in each project country.

• Review of the status of all on-going modeling studies developed and transferred to the respective countries, through TA provided by NASA, ICBA and the other international expert teams and the status of the training activities identified in the capacity building program.

• Resolving of all pending technical or financial issues.

Supervision Missions Outcomes

End Users Engagement Process

•Priorities

•Challenges Identifying

•Feedback

•Data for Calibration

Providing • Information

• Solutions Producing

• National End User Engagement workshops were held in: • Lebanon (November 13, 2012),

• Jordan (November 11, 2012)

• Tunisia (November 23, 2012),

• Morocco (January 17, 2013) and

• Egypt (April 14, 2013).

• The workshops were instrumental in ensuring vast and varied end-user participation (i.e. stakeholder agencies, academia, the private sector etc) in the development of various applications of remote sensing and earth observation for improved water resources and agricultural management.

• The principal outcome of these workshops was refining the technical implementation plans, with implementing agency and NASA staff , while defining the user data sets that were going to be used in the validation process.

End Users Engagement Process

1. AWC attended all project country’s National Workshops during 2012 and 2013, and compiled a regional report on the outcomes of national workshops, Dec 2012

2. A report on the Outcomes of the 1st Regional Workshop, May 2013

3. A Regional “Mid Term Review” MTR report. June, 2014

4. A report of the Outcomes of the ET Regional Workshop, Nov 2014

5. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E)

AWC Regional Reporting

6. A report of the Outcomes of the Groundwater Regional Workshop ( May 2015)

7. Regional Report on Drought Management ( May 2015).

8. Regional Project Implementation Completion Report ICR ( May 2015).

AWC Regional Achievements

Launching the Regional Project Portal

To serve as a repository of programmatic tech

info and events for the project such as reports,

case studies, snapshots of national results, and

will also give the countries the accessibility to

add and update their own info and results

directly

Purpose:

Launching Date: September 14, 2014

Countries accounts were created and Technical

Manual was provided to all countries.

Link: http://www.rciwrm-awc.org

• AWC integrated a regional drought report based on the national drought outcomes generated by Implementing agencies .

• The main objective of this reports is to summarize all the national findings and to define a regional Methodology and recommended regional action plan that can applied for “Modeling the Drought Risk Assessment and Monitoring in the Arab Region”. (Suggested in Phase II).

AWC Regional Drought Report

1.1 Status By Component

Actually Achieved Remaining

Component 1 79,96 20,04

Component 2 72 28

Component 3 81,81 18,19

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ing Implementation Progress of Project Components

• The review of the project implementation revealed that the project physical and financial implementation progress is completed for all components in all countries as follows:

1. The key technical results have been fully achieved in the respective studies in each country;

2. The implementation of the end-user activities (the application of the modeling results) had been achieved through the increased number of the modeling output results reported to stakeholders and number of decisions made to the end-users.

3. The number of stakeholder staff trained on the use of the remote sensing (RS) WISP tools (for all project related officials and experts from the implementation agencies and the line ministries);

Overall Project Implementation Progress

• The regional technical coordination had been strengthened by increased number of regional and country RS knowledge/study results dissemination and exchange workshops and the specific technical trainings, that improved the application of study results at the regional level.

Overall Project Implementation Progress

Overall Disbursement in May 2015::

The overall project disbursement had been greatly improved from:

18% in April, 2014 / 34% in September, 2014/ 47% in December 2014

50% in January 2015/ 70% in April, 2015 and 95% in May.

All remaining budgets have been fully committed.

Implementation Challenges

The adoption, customization and application of the models require developing specialized skills which can be conducted by very few international experts.

Completion of all capacity building activities created a challenge, especially concerning the models that are under development (DisAlexi model) or not yet identified to transfer (drought and ground water models), or not ready for release to recipient (LIS, Egypt). This resulted in some delay/block of achievements of some of the project indicators.

Lack of incentives for endusers/ partners to be involved in verification process and in providing data for validation, this was later resolved by signing several MOUs.

Administrative difficulties: in participating in regional and international training because of lengthy internal paper work.

Security Constrains: regarding the political and security status across some of the project countries that occurred during the project implementation period- for instance in case of Egypt and Lebanon.

• The importance of having a defined training plan at the national and regional level during the project preparations and prior to the start date of the project.

• It’s better to narrow down the number of applications implemented by each country and to choose two or three main applications.

• The need to strengthen the regional scientific and applied activities in this project which shall focus on the data gaps, knowledge needs and regional information.

• The Importance of strengthening the relation with end-users through the end-user participation approach developed by AWC in phase I.

• The Importance of strengthening the role of the regional coordination and communications in exchanging the knowledge, identifying common issues, discussing regional solutions.

Lessons Learned

• To ensure that outputs of each modeling study will include clear and specific policy and technical recommendations on the improvement of the existing agriculture water management, especially on the improvement of existing agriculture water management policy, strategy, and planning by the end-users in the respective countries, in order to be able to demonstrate/implement the scientific study results/outputs on the ground .

• To Maintain the sustainability of this project through a second phase where we continue the transfer and adaptation of cutting-edge technology in remote sensing for the use in planning and management of water and land resources in the MENA region.

• Evaluate and focus on potential increases/decreases in irrigation water requirements under various climate change scenarios to inform the planning of agricultural policies on the national and regional level.

Recommendations

• Monitor Water Productivity and conduct Water Accounting on the national and Regional Level.

• Provide End-users with water balance data for a national, regional and temporal perspective to identify, Short term and long term trends in water usage anomalies

• Develop a Regional Geodatabase to be linked to the current Regional Information Portal created in Phase I with continuous update on the crop type, crop yield, water use .

• Develop a Regional Study for Monitoring and Assessing Drought Hazard in Regional Level.

Recommendations

• During the last year of the project Implementation of (Phase I) and based on the scientific outcomes, the implementing countries showed interest in extending the project activities into a second phase .

• The main focus of phase II will be to obtain advanced training, implementation of the models and stakeholders/Endusers capacity building in early warning and DSS for sustainable management of natural resources.

Phase II

• Phase Two should build on the outcome of Phase one,

• Focus on important activities that makes difference and need external support in terms of knowledge and tools,

• Operationalizing end users capacity to utilize the information for improving decision making and increasing water use efficiency,

• Conducting studies that can add value to the decision making process on the national and regional level.

• Opening the source of knowledge and technical assistance to others proven high standards centers.

Rational of Phase II

• Establishing a regional network for remote sensing based information linked to the regional existing Hub.

• Focus on national and regional research activities that can be implemented by the country’s own programs or others of regional interests that can be implemented by AWC in coordination with countries.

• The Proposed Duration for the second phase is 4-5 years.

Rational of Phase II

• Continue the transfer and adaptation of cutting-edge technology in remote sensing for the use in planning and management of water and land resources in the MENA region.

• Develop a Regional Geodatabase to be linked to the current Regional Information Portal created in Phase I with continuous update on the crop type, crop yield, water use .

• Develop a Regional Study for Monitoring and Assessing Drought Hazard in Regional Level.

Expected Outcomes of Phase II

• Evaluate potential increases/decreases in irrigation water requirements under various climate change scenarios to inform the planning of agricultural policies on the national and regional level.

• Analyze past and current water related conditions (i.e. forest fires, flood and drought Management) to inform improved water policy decisions and build risk resilience on the national and regional level in the food and water nexus.

• Monitor Water Productivity and conduct Water Accounting on the national and Regional Level.

• Provide End-users with water balance data for a national, regional and temporal perspective to identify, Short term and long term trends in water usage anomalies.

Expected Outcomes of Phase II