 Welcome everybody to today's webinar called Climate Change and Water Scarcity. We are very honored today to have Professor Dr. Eddie Morse, he is a rector of IHC Delft Institute for Water Education. And before I'm handing over to him, I will briefly explain you something about the setup of the webinar. So my name is Leneke Knope, I'm from the Water Channel, and this webinar is part of the webinar series organized by IHC Delft, in cooperation with the Water Channel for alumni. So a very warm welcome to all of you, I see many of us are already online. What we can do today is this webinar is an interactive webinar, and you are welcome to share your questions in the chat box. In the corner bottom at the right, you will see this chat box. You can post your questions there throughout the whole webinar, and we will compile them during the webinar. After the presentation of Eddie Morse, we will post the questions one by one to him, and he will answer them for you. And finally, I would like to ask you if you can share your name and your expertise also in the chat box, so in order for us to have an ID who is actually here in the room today. And all recordings will be shared later on on the waterchannel.tv and on the website of IHC Delft. So today's webinar is about climate change. I don't think the topic needs a lot of introduction, but I'm very happy and honored to introduce to you Professor Eddie Morse. And besides being a rector of IHC Delft, he also holds the position of Professor of Water and Climate at the University in Amsterdam. He started his career actually at the World Meteorological Organization, working in Africa and the Caribbean. And before coming to Delft, he also worked at the Wageningen University and Research Center. Having a background in hydrology and climate change, the present focus of his research is on the occurrence of trends and extremes, as well as on measures to mitigate these extremes. And this is actually where I would like to hand over to Professor Eddie Morse to present about the things I just mentioned. Eddie, the floor is yours. Thank you, Lenneke, and I'm very honored that I have the opportunity actually to say a few words about climate change and water scarcity. What Lenneke asked is if you have any questions to post those questions, but I must say I have some questions myself as well. So besides having questions from your side, I would also be very interested to know about your suggestions and maybe answers that you may have to some of the questions that I will post during my presentation. So what I would like to do is I would like to start by introducing a couple of definitions because I know that sometimes you have different views when using the same words. And then I would like to spend a few words on climate change. Like Lenneke already said, I think climate change is something that everybody appreciates and have different opinions about. So I would like to indicate a few developments that I would like to share with you. Then say something about impacts and possible options for way forwards. So first, the definitions. One is water scarcity. So the way how I use the word water scarcity is the lack of sufficient available water resources to meet what it needs within a region. And that means that it may affect, say, every continent. And I do think a large number of people is impacted by water scarcity already. And what we see and believe is that that impact will become greater over the years to come. Then water scarcity, I think you can say, split up into two main mechanisms. One is one that's more physical, so absolute water scarcity. And the second one is economic water scarcity. And connected to that, I think that the perceptions of the stakeholders or the people who are experiencing a possible shortage of water is very important. So that's why I put in the symbolic design on the right-hand side to show you that even looking at the two-dimensional picture, you could still have a different impression on what you see in a picture. So I think it's very important to share one another's perceptions. To work a little bit further on the definition of scarcity, often we also talk about drought. If you talk about droughts, if you look at the two boxes that I depicted here in this one, on the left-hand side you have physical water scarcity, and on the right-hand side you have economic water scarcity. Within physical water scarcity, I think we're talking about a couple of different sorts of droughts, and those droughts are mainly linked to, say, the causes why those droughts are happening. So one important one is what we call a hydrological drought. A hydrological drought is where we have a shortage of surface water. Another one is, say, the mythological droughts. And with the mythological droughts we often just look at precipitation and precipitation deficits. Those two are influencing actually the agro-hydrological droughts or ecological droughts. And that drought is the drought that has been experienced because of a shortage of soil water deficits. And that you see reflected often in yields or in vegetation or ecosystems that are experiencing water shortage. Then another drought that you may have is an hydrological drought. And that drought is not caused by surface water shortage but by groundwater deficits. And both groundwater deficits as well as the agro-hydrological droughts are depending on antecedent water storage. So the storage term is very important in there. Of course there can also be a surface water storage but it can also be groundwater storage. The most important, I think, is the economic water scarcity, which is on the right-hand side, where water demand is being created through our socio-economic drought. So the water demand, the stakeholder is playing a very important part. And I think if you start talking about drought it's about how drought is being perceived by the end user. So it could well be that the farmer is experiencing drought while maybe somebody who is interested in forest is not experiencing that drought. Or that a water resource manager is experiencing a drought because he's also responsible for transportation. So to have enough water in the rivers, while for the farmer at that moment in time it's still not a drought. So I think it's very important to decide which user you are addressing when you're talking about the drought. Then about climate change. Of course climate change is very much related to CO2 emissions. And this is a graph that shows actually the latest review on how much CO2 emissions are there. That always lags behind the year because you need the reporting. So as you see in here it's until 2016. And what you also see is that what we experience is a flattening of the rise of CO2 emissions, which is a good sign. An important role in there is because of the Chinese switching slowly from other energy sources and are reducing the amount of coal that they are using. So that's a very important development and of course most interesting is if we can curb this so stabilized level that we're seeing at the moment towards a decline in the future. That means that we're talking about mitigation of climate change. And in the mitigation side the energy is a very important one because the emissions from the energy is there. You can separate that in two parts. One on the right hand side you see the cost of electricity and on the left hand side is the energy generation and of course demand is the third player in this picture. But if you look at energy generation on the left hand side you see that we are already experiencing a decline in fossil fuels and that we see an increase for example in more sustainable energy sources like solar. Then if you look at the right hand side and that's very important is that you also see I think an important trend in the cost of electricity. So you see an increase in for example oil or nuclear or coal energy sources while you see a stabilizing of wind energy and you see a decline in solar energy. So this combination of a decline in cost of energy together with an increase in energy generation I think is a good driver to make a change in what we are presently using for energy sources. So I think this is a positive development. But even with this development in place and if you look at say the commitments that were done at the Paris Agreement two years ago and how they are implemented we will not succeed with the present commitments to reduce the amount of CO2 that is emitted to reduce the effects of climate change. So that means that for the future climate and especially for the first 50 years to come we have to consider the changes that are ahead and if you look here then you see in the right hand box you see some of the projections and projections that are there. We now talk about RCPs and those RCPs are actually reflecting the level of CO2 emissions and what that means for temperature increase. So the highest RCP is say around 8 and the lowest is around 2 and what we would like to achieve as an international community is a one and a half degree increase in temperature change and for that one we have to increase our commitments to reduce our energy quite a lot. So the message is that we are still not there so that we should take into account possible adaptation. Adaptation is based on say some of the main drivers. Two of them are one temperature and the other one precipitation and there you can think about average temperature or total changes in precipitation but for a lot of sectors it's more important what happens with the derivatives of those two main drivers. So on the two left hand boxes what you see is changes in temperature and in this case it's about for example say the maximum temperature or the minimum temperature. An example why that is important is if you want to recover actually from a warm day that means that you need a good night rest and a good night rest very much depends if temperature goes above say 27, 30 degrees to enable you to recover. So on the right hand side you see some indicators for precipitation and those are linked in this case to an excess of water. One is indicating say a total increase in heavy rainfall showers and another one is showing an increase in the number of days that you may have such heavy showers. And as you probably know if you are talking about flood events the flood is not depending on the total amount of rain in a year but it very much depends on how much water is falling and how much time in which place. So I think information like this is very important to know what you can do. The impacts of those issues and I just give one example here that comes from the IPCC report from the fifth assessment report and sometimes can be depicted using say images like this and it shows actually a little bit about how much emphasis we can put on the impact for different sectors of those changes in climate. And it shows for the different regions where we think at the moment that the hotspots are for those changes but it also shows a little bit about how much confidence we can have in what comes from those projections. So I think this is very helpful if you start talking with stakeholders about what a possible impact of climate change may be. Then it's not only climate change there are also some other drivers that are important to take into consideration and I think they are related. So one of them is urbanization and I just took one picture here to show how urbanization is going to increase and if you look at the global level the line shows you also a little bit what's happening in the different continents and you can see that we expect for 2017 that more than 50% of the population on the globe is living in urban areas and by 2050 it will rise to 65%. And so how we're dealing with our urbanization and what's happening in cities is very important to know how to arrange our resources. Now one of those resources is groundwater and I just took one picture here from Iran. This is a groundwater aquifer close to Mashat in Iran and what you see is that if you look at the long-year trend that the groundwater is lowering by about half a meter per year and this is not an exception you see it in a lot of continents happening and why this is important is that because groundwater is one of the reservoirs that are say there and we can use them if we use it in a sustainable way to overcome a period of water shortage. So it is possible mitigation measure or opportunity to overcome say water scarcity. Now if you look at what is being perceived by the economic form and this is their latest report from 2018 and this is on perception of risks and then you see in this graph on the x-axis the likelihood of certain risks while on the y-axis you see the impact and so if you look at the right-hand corner there you have those events that are say having the biggest likelihood and also the biggest impact. If you look at the left-hand side at the table and then you see on the first table the likelihood you see the five events that are considered as most likely to happen and this table just below that on the impact there is something about which ones may have the highest impact. Just to name a couple of them, the first one is say the emerging or the mitigation of adaptation and mitigation of climate change and other one and that's on the impact side, on the bottom side you see water crisis and you also see a couple of other say events that may happen. I will share the slides later on because I acknowledge that say the symbols in the graph are a bit small for you to read but one other maybe interesting one is the one that you see in the corner over here and that says a little bit about possible conflict and mass destruction that may happen but here you see that the impact is high but the likelihood is I think luckily considered to be low. In the news at the moment and I think if you have been following the news then one of them is what's happening in Cape Town and in Cape Town it's experiencing the search in a row of droughts and why this one interesting is because it's an expectation if they don't receive water soon they may end up in a real crisis by the beginning of April and if you look at say this slide here that depicts a little bit about the precipitation in Cape Town then you also see that actually April is the month that the rains will start and that the periods before that are the month with a low in precipitation that means for that period people really depend about what's available in water storage in Cape Town very much depends actually on surface water storage and there in a number of years the surface water storage has not been replenished enough to overcome this normal period where you have a say limited number of rains. Of course Cape Town is not say the only town that's experiencing this if you look a bit further actually and we'll come back to that there are other cities that are also experiencing droughts as well not always for the same reasons. I think it's important to look at what's happening with climate change is that what we see with climate change that there is a shift in precipitation patterns both in time and in space. This is an example of India on the right hand side here you see actually say when the onset of the monsoon is there and of course that's in the agricultural sense very important starting day to know when you should start sowing your crop but what you also see in this graph over here these are the months of the years and the different colors the different say crops are depicted but you see that depending on the crop there's a different say dependency on different water resources so if this is time and if you now get a shift say in when for example the temperature is going to increase you will get a shift in the availability of melt water and that's especially in the Indus but also partly in the upstream of the Ganges important so availability of water due to melt of the Himalayas will become available earlier in time but will be limited later in time so that means that there is a shift of the availability of water and another possibility is that there is a shift in precipitation patterns coming from the monsoons in this region and if this one shifts to the right that also means that in the period that you will have less monsoon precipitation available that you also have to think about if you are able to supply rainfall depending crop with surface water reservoir or groundwater reservoir available water or if you should shift to another land use or another cropping pattern like I said there are also other cities and here is just a list from a newspaper clipping coming from the BBC and there are 11 cities listed here I will not go over them but what you see in this list is that what is happening in Cape Town is not a single event that's happening there but similar events are happening in other cities but causes are sometimes different so for example if you look at Bangladesh there besides having in some cases a shortage of water it's mainly the water quality the same is happening in Bangalore which is a city, there's a lot of lakes around it but the water quality of the lakes is an important issue why a part of the water that is available can't be used for drinking water or in some cases not even for agricultural purposes you see this water quality issue coming back in a number of other cities and I think it's an increasing problem that we are facing but not everyone is aware of this issue then talking about ways forward now one of them is to increase water productivity because as you know the agricultural sector is a very important water user that's why I also gave this example from India about shifts in water availability if you are able to increase water productivity in the agricultural sector and we are able to use this water for different purposes we may be able to at least reduce the risk of water shortages like what's happening now in Cape Town another way forward would be to restore the response function of the soil that can either be say the surface soil which is important for agriculture purposes but also for our natural terrestrial ecosystems or we can try to increase actually our aquifer capacity to hold water and to have this water available to overcome periods of droughts alternative water supplies and you could think about water treatment and the reuse of water could also be desalination possibilities are another way forward that we could develop but I think very important is also that cities and regions are prepared for droughts so that means that drought management and having drought management plans available before a drought start and start a discussion when the drought is there but that you take the adequate measures at the beginning when you expect a drought instead of when you are in a drought I think is very important and I would like to invite you to come up with other ways forward because I do think that there is no single solution for all the problems that we are facing just to emphasize that a little bit I here give an example on water demand and what you see in this graph here is water abstraction and water use one example is actually from the energy sector the energy sector has a big water abstraction and that's because of the cooling facilities that they need for water with a small water use and then in some cases you may say okay then that's not such a big issue but I think it's good to know that in a number of cases it is water use increases the temperature of the water and by increasing the temperature they impact the aquatic and ecological value of the surface water and in some cases they are then not allowed to discharge the water anymore so if that happens that means that they have to stop operating and actually a number of years ago a situation like that almost happened in Europe where during a heat wave it was very close to stop the operation of the energy producing facilities and if something like that happens we can assume that a lot of this may have an impact also because some of the other water uses are agriculture and industry but also drinking water and they very much depend on energy so we need energy to have that available as well to assure that we can distribute water and that we can treat water and that we can make water available at the right place at the right time so this connection to the energy is a very strong and important link to reduce the amount of energy that is being used also has an impact on say climate mitigation so can we reduce also the greenhouse gas emissions from the amount of energy that we are using so making for example water treatment facilities more energy efficient is something I think is an important part to look at then I think both in the energy sector but also for example if you are looking at the agricultural sector in some cases also think about the supply chain or the production chain because first of all of course you can think about efficiency improvement which is always a nice thing if you have a business that you operate because that may improve your revenues that you get from your business but it is also a way how you can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and I think an important one is these are all about energy efficiencies that you could improve in different parts of production chain but I think the demand management also for a production chain so that is also about what we are eating so our diet is playing a role in there about how much energy and water we are using in the different sectors and that is also true for all other occasions so I think looking at the supply chain if you are thinking about how you can mitigate water problems is an important starting point now like I said I have some questions as well so here are my questions to you can you provide seasonal drought scarcity forecast at the moment if you look at our seasonal forecast in some regions like in Africa we can say something about it but then you still have to think about something like say a sort of yes no or maybe 30% accuracy about those forecasts not more than that and I think looking at what is happening at Cape Town we are originally to improve those forecasts so how can we do that and are we able to do that the second one is if we are talking about drought so water shortage I think we should also consider the fact that in a lot of cases we also are thinking about floods and if you look at what is happening with climate change in a lot of regions we see both so a reduction of water in certain periods but also we see an increase in the intensity of showers in another period so that may mean that the overall change in precipitation over the year may be not that big but the distribution of precipitation very much addresses an issue where we should think about drought and flood mitigation the third question is can we increase the response capacity of landscapes and there you could think about for example the catapult meal proposal that was done by France during the negotiations and the last COP in Paris where we would like to increase the organic matter in the top soil to enable the soils to better capture moisture that's falling so using precipitation that's falling the second important part in there is if you improve the hydraulic characteristics of the soil you can also improve the infiltration characteristics and I think that's not only true for agriculture but very much also true for cities we assure that in cities that we don't close off the surface but that we actually allow water to enter the soil and also keep it there so we can use it in a period of drought of course there are limits there so that's where the feedback is to the flood system but I think another important part is can we manage our demands so demand management both of water but also on food on energy I think is a very important player then of course if you talk about the bond management is about how do we engage with stakeholders there are differences in perceptions like I said so how can you address that and how do we finance the mitigation measures so financing both to do an investment but also how can we build a business model to assure good operation and maintenance of the investments that we make are I think important topics especially in the water sector and then the last part is do we have enough time to implement these measures so if you look at large measures and if you look at the decision and if you look at the regulations that we have there often implementation measures can take even decades to be implemented so do we have this time or are the changes going faster than that should we look maybe at a different way and then I think we are starting to talk about governance how we can speed up this implementation of measures so I think the overall question is how do we share our waters now and in the future and having said that I think coming back to this risk assessment my opinion is that what I think that if you now look at what's happening for example in Cape Town that we see this water crisis that this moment depicted here on this likelihood and impact chart that it will move up and that it will become a bigger say risk and have a bigger impact in the future and I'm not sure that everybody is aware about this so I think it's very urgent that we start spreading the news and we start talking about possible solutions especially because we need such a long lead time to implement possible mitigation measures and with that I would like to thank you for your attention and open for questions and suggestions Thank you very much I will now pull up some questions that we received and thank you everybody also for sending in these questions what I noticed is that there were a few questions on slides so I think I put them up first and then I also put the related slides so the first question is on this slide put the question there it comes so Aaron Jan van Bodegom he asks could you please explain a bit more on the image of the globe on hotspots could you explain a bit more could you elaborate a bit further yes so what it depicts actually a little bit is what you see in the corner over here it explains a little bit the symbols and what these symbols tell you is a bit something about what say the likelihood is that something happens so how much confidence do we have that a certain change may take place now if you then look at the three other symbols that are here that is by categorizing say the different sectors that are there and what you see in there is also how much of the changes are going to be attributed to climate change because like I said it's not only about climate change it's also other changes that are taking place so we would like to know what the attribution is to climate change and I think important for that is the discussion that is taking place for example about funding possible solutions so think about for example the Green Climate Fund they really would like to fund possible solutions but they would like to address climate change and so there's a big discussion if you should also fund development oriented improvements and personally I think you can't always separate it too but it's something that you need to address if you want to apply for such funding now if you look at the images in the boxes over here they just summarize a little bit on what's happening in the different continents so give a global view I think this is interesting picture because it shows on a global level where what sector is impacted by climate change or by other sectors and by that it's giving the global community a very fast over view on what may happen and I put this forward because I think having communications and having a good interaction with your stakeholders is very important and images like this I can help in there although of course it's much too broad to think about possible measures because then you have to zoom in and you have to look at the local conditions and what's locally happening Thank you for that answer very clear and up next there was a slide on groundwater depletion I will put that slide again forward and then we have two questions related to groundwater it was about this slide I'll make it fit a bit better so first of all José Raúl Perez Duran asks, declining groundwater levels shown in the example come from over exploitation or are they related to reduction in water recharge of aquifers? I think that's a really good question I think in this case it's a combination of the two I do think that what is very interesting here is the city of Masat is first of all a big city but it also has a very big influx of people that come there for special celebrations which puts an extra emphasis on what use in a certain period and I think in this case it's difficult to separate the two so I do think it's a combined effort but the only thing is that climate change you can't change the over expectation is where there is a possible way how you could manage and possibly improve actually what's happening here there is one related question it's from Saarod he's from Nepal and he asks issues related to groundwater depletion in the context of increasing urbanization in one hand you are talking about climate change and on the other hand urbanization in that scenario how would you relate groundwater depletion with urbanization and climate change and how do you see the effect of climate change in groundwater depletion in the scenario of increasing urbanization that's a good question and I think it almost requires complete research but let me try to answer a couple of questions because I think they're slightly related if you talk about cities and there are say different issues there if you talk about delta cities there are often built of soft soil so in that case with soft soil and you extract water for drinking water purposes you have an added problem which is caused by say the lowering of the surface soil because of this extraction of water the lowering of the surface soil sometimes may induce an intrusion of sea water which may cause salt water intrusion also in drinking water system so that will say reduce amount of water that you can use but if you then talk about a city maybe somewhat higher upstream in the catchment area again I think they are linked one is that an aquifer is often not restricted to say the city boundaries so you're talking about the catchment area and I think if you look at how water is being extracted and you also have a historical pattern and so what you often see that it will be done close by to the city or in the city the groundwater system but then because the city is growing so that's where the urbanization takes part that this water is not sufficient anymore and you can do a pretty simple calculation where you look at say the amount of square kilometers that the city a boundary is encompassing and you can calculate how much water is falling and how much will be lost due to evaporation for example and then you know how much is available in a sustainable way coming from precipitation so if you are over extracting from your groundwater system what's coming available there then I think you can know already beforehand that your groundwater table is growing I think a bigger issue in city areas is the contamination that also takes place in the same city area so that also means that often the groundwater under a city area is not from the right quality to be used directly for drinking water purposes meaning that the city will depend from the aquifers or the surface water systems surrounding the city and there with climate change changing the availability of water and maybe even the water coming in a short period of time and that means that you really have to either increase your surface water reservoirs which is not always a good step forward because of the evaporation that takes place from surface water or it's just not room enough to create such a surface water system and I think there restoring the aquifers sometimes that may take a time but I think that could be a very sustainable way to develop so I do think that say taking better care of our aquifers on the long run is a very important way that we should follow. Thank you for this answer I hope that will give Saroj a start as you said that can take a whole research to answer questions like these but thank you very much the next question is again about one of the slides it's I think it's this slide it's a question of Aaron Jan van Borchum again he asks how did you come up with the events so how are these events you know plot it down how are they defined or how are they decided yeah this is I think if you really want to know the details I suggest to read the report I think the sources is in the bottom of the slide but this is actually how say a number of stakeholders that are interviewed by the World Economic Forum how they experience and how they think that the risk will develop in 2018 so it's really built on people's perceptions on what the impact and the likelihood of risks are Thank you what we will do we will also upload the slides later on so people can also see the source because now this is not readable but we will provide this information then those were the questions regarding the slides and there are many more questions coming in thank you I would like to go to another question of José Raúl I'll put it up right now the question is assessment of economic impact is a big challenge when it comes to estimating future trends in prices over long time periods of agricultural produce for example is there some research development that facilitate reaching such estimates or forecasts yeah that's again a good question I think that that's difficult to predict I don't know if you look at the stock exchange and you look how that fluctuates because a part of the prices are being determined by the the world markets I think putting your money there will tell you a little bit about how difficult it is of course it's not only the world markets partly of the prices also on local markets I do think that you could inform that's maybe on the short term farmers a little bit better about development but I see a big progress there in the use of smart phones and having the right information available I think working on that you should always look on what possibilities a farmer has to change something so if you're talking about changing a crop then first of all that takes often at least sometimes it also means that the farmer has to change the equipment that he's using so that it means investment so that it will take even longer and so then he needs predictions from years ahead another one that is maybe shorter term could be if you know something about how much water he may expect he could think about if the planting distance should be larger because there's water or if he can take the risk that he can put it closer together but I think that's also something that I really appreciate with the information about how prices are developing on the market with this risk information I think he can make a better informed decision on what he can do so I see developments there especially I think with our telecommunication developments I think that's going to offer possibilities and especially I think farmers that are closely located to big cities, urban areas so providing food and cities I think there you can do much more with information and now talking about weather instead of climate change but weather information I think can help a farmer to improve say the income that he has A question related to this in terms of reaching farmers is one asked by Katarina Marinetti she says we have seen that scientists and researchers have produced a wide amount of valuable information in predicting and analyzing the impacts of climate change and what can be done to translate this even better information into advisory systems for end users so you were just already mentioning all these tools and mobile applications etc is there also something else that you can ask this question specifically I think maybe a little bit of information about risks and how you can deal with risks it's very important for people to appreciate what you can do with climate change and I think if you can build this risk into your business model as a farmer for example I think that can help a farmer of course there are also cases in which you can't give the precise information that you would like to have so you also have to deal with that but I think in that case you should also inform the farmer that this is just not possible to do and then the farmer can make his decision on maybe other objectives so how much research does he have and what can he do based on that so I think giving him clarity about what you can do but also I think not a yes or no answer it's about risk assessment and helping him to make this decision I think that's the most important thing that you can do so clarifying the risks that are associated with the numbers that you're providing to them in the form of precipitation or temperature changes I think that's the best contribution that we can supply to the farmers thank you for the answer and I see we have a little bit more time and we also have some questions but I see some questions are also so very broad I think you can write a whole PhD dissertation on that so you also ask questions to the audience and I think one comment after the questions that you raised was this comment raised by Katharina and I think it would be good to read that out now to also see how the audience responds so one thing she says I have to see if this is the right one financing resources for mitigation message hygiene agriculture are available through governments or international aid programs however their access is often limited for users there should be an increase in the internal capacity and expertise of local water agriculture managing authorities to foster the implementation of the measures and make them more available to users so it's a bit also related in my opinion to her earlier question I think this is one of the ideas that she puts forward when you said how to continue I fully agree and I think that we have to work on how we can do this I think another important part is that if you are introducing measures you also have to start thinking about how you can support it by making finances available I think that it's not only about informing the farmers it's also about informing people who have access to those financial sources on what they can do with that because in a number of cases it will be difficult for a farmer to ask for investments because the investing agency finds the risk too big or doesn't have the capacity to really appreciate the risk in such a way that he is still able to release those funds for a farmer to indeed make an improvement that's needed to overcome the variability that he's experiencing in the meteorological parameters such as temperature and precipitation One final question that is lined up I'll put it here The question is that it might take more than a webinar to answer The question is from Professor with the web I quickly want to copy it it's about the Himalayas and changing patterns Could you elaborate? I don't know if you know this a bit more on precipitation shifting patterns of monsoon shifts in the Himalayas Yes I guess this is a work field and it's very interesting to know Yes What you see happening in the Himalayas and that's very strongly related also to changes in sea surface temperatures is that in a number of cases precipitation is starting later in the year and in a number of cases that even the total amount of precipitation that's available in the season is reducing If you look at the Himalayas then if you go from west to east then the further you go to the eastern side the more important monsoon influences is becoming while in the western side it's more the melt water that is determining the water availability So if you then look at the western side when what precipitation is falling for example in the form of snow that may delay the availability of water also very much determine how much water becomes available downstream the way how the patterns, the monsoon patterns are completely changing I think that's still very variable so that means that if you look at the natural variation that you see in there also in time and space is as large as what we see in the projections what we do see is that this variability is increasing and I think that's a common image that we see so the intensity is increasing while the total amount is remaining the same or sometimes also even increasing a little bit which would mean that you have more water available but because of this shift in time and space of the patterns this water is not always available at the place and time so we would like to have it at least for the present way how we're using water thank you very much for this answer we are reaching now the final question make it a bit bigger and that question we just received from Da Wengua Chitata he asks what is the potential for experiential learning two-way learning from science policy practice interface in drought mitigation I think I'm very much in favor of doing this so I do think that we should learn better from difficult situations I do acknowledge that if such situation is happening the first thing you think about is not about research because you're trying to alleviate the problem but I do think that we should try to learn more from those difficult situations and I think in a case like this for example if we look at what's happening in Cape Town there are of course a lot of people who are thinking about possible solutions and I think it would be really good to find out if we can implement those solutions have a good observation along that and see how those solutions have the highest effect on say mitigating problems that we are facing over there I also think that a number of those solutions may take a number of years so I think it's good to follow the implementation of those solutions and see if in the long run they still are the best solutions to have in place so I think there's two way learning that's suggested here I think that's something where you really need this collaboration between researchers, the politicians but also say the private sector that is implementing certain new technologies and see how we can engage with science policy and practice so I'm very much in favor of doing things like that and see how you can implement certain measures in the field and see if that gives the results that you expect and I think it should not be a small pilot, it should be say as big as possible so you're talking actually about implementing measures instead of doing research so I think implementing measures is starting point but I do think that having research parallel to that to see how effective it is and to learn and adapt while you're implementing the measure would be a great way forward Yes, thank you very much for this answer and I think it's very much in line with one of the comments that just has been given by one of the participants and she also asked some feedback of the participants who really like to close the webinar with his comments and it's José Raúl Pérez-Durán who says to approach adaptation or mitigation in climate change there are many ideas and proposals that are not different from what we thought about in the past to solutions in the water sector and one good thing about the climate change perspective is that it brings many things together and he ends with saying that maybe climate change needs implementing ideas or solutions which we have also thought of in the past I think that's sort of summarized also your last comment Yes, very much I would like to thank you, Professor Eddie Morse for answering very diverse questions and being able to address everything and I would like to thank all the participants to be so actively involved and I would like to thank the whole IHE team Mariana, Dine, Wim and Ger who are there in Delft with you and I would also like to announce that the next webinar will take place on March 6 that will be on water diplomacy with Aaron Wolf and Zaki Schuber announcements will follow through the usual channels and a recording of this webinar we will put online later today on thewaterchannel.tv and will also be shared through the IHE site of course and your presentation will be part of that as well so thank you everybody and we hope to see you on March 6 again Thank you