30 Years of Innovation and Excellence: GRID-Arendal Annual Report 2019

Highlighting innovative local solutions to droughts

GRID-Arendal collaborated with UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme to put together a visually compelling digital exhibition and publication entitled “Droughts in the Anthropocene”. We produced 16 short videos about drought case studies around the globe, highlighting the different ways that communities are proactively coping with water shortages, from the Aral Sea

to Zambia. An accompanying publication features more detail on each case study. We unveiled the exhibition and the English/French version of the publication during the 40th session of the UNESCO General Conference in Paris in November, then launched the English/Spanish version of the publication in December at the UN Climate Change Conference COP 25 in Madrid.

KEY NUMBERS

1.1 billion

number of people affected by drought-related natural disasters from 1995 to 2015

22,000

number of people who died in drought-related natural disasters from 1995 to 2015

GRID-Arendal’s Hanna Gjerdi (third from left), who led the “Droughts in the Anthropocene” project, joins collaborators in launching the exhibition and publication in Paris.

30 million 6,300

number of people whose livelihoods rely on Lake Chad

litres of water that can be collected each day from an innovative fog-harvesting system in a mountain community in south-west Morocco

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