Essential Monitor's Guide for Prairie Water Retention
A water retention project is natural infrastructure that delivers flood, drought, water quality, and other benefits—such as improved habitat, biodiversity, and carbon storage—as a result of managing water and becoming naturalized. Monitoring is necessary to ensure that water retention projects across the Prairies are performing to specification and to track that project performance is upheld over time.
Monitoring is necessary to ensure that water retention projects across the Prairies are performing to specification and to track that project performance is upheld over time.
Biophysical monitoring allows us to understand the additional benefits that water retention projects provide beyond flood and drought mitigation and the management changes that can be applied to maximize those additional benefits.
With the diversity and affordability of tools available today for monitoring water retention, there has never been a better time to begin monitoring a system in your own watershed.
Water retention provides flood, drought, water-quality, and additional benefits, such as improved habitat, biodiversity, and carbon storage, which can be increased through water management and when naturalized. These benefits typically serve as drivers for the implementation of water retention practices within ongoing work to adapt to our changing climate.
Monitoring both water quantity and quality allows us to better understand a site’s performance and the various influences that site design, operation, and maintenance have on enhancing its effectiveness and related co-benefits.
Currently, there is limited long-term data available demonstrating water-quality benefits across a variety of different sites, which we know can vary in performance for several reasons.
Critically, the knowledge gained from monitoring water retention can be used to design sites that
provide better adaption to our changing climate,
are optimized to deliver multiple benefits, and
can be better managed to uphold their performance long after they are constructed
This guidance document aims to make water retention monitoring a more accessible practice from a technical standpoint by demystifying some of the considerations required to get started. It includes a review of various pieces of monitoring equipment, methods of analysis for water quantity and quality, and practical insights and example applications drawn from IISD's own water retention monitoring and modelling experience.
With the diversity and affordability of tools available today for monitoring water retention, there has never been a better time to begin monitoring a system in your own watershed.
Many conflict-affected states are also among the most vulnerable to #ClimateChange. The NAP process offers an opportunity to break this cycle. Learn more in our new guidance note.
#ClimateChange adaptation and peacebuilding go hand in hand. Our report provides strategic steps to kickstart climate adaptation planning in a way that responds to peace & conflict dynamics.
How can conflict-affected countries make links between #ClimateChange adaptation plans and peacebuilding as they grapple with pressing issues? Learn more about this crucial intersection here.
For states experiencing conflict, climate change adaptation is rarely, if ever, an immediate priority: issues such as national defence, the prevention of further loss of life and suffering, and the establishment of peace take precedence. In countries recovering from conflict and violence, where peace—however fragile—has been established, governments are often faced with the difficult, lengthy, and complex task of strengthening and rebuilding the governance mechanisms and institutions required to meet the immediate needs of their population and to protect them from a host of risks, including the return of violence. As in situations of active conflict, prioritizing climate change action in peacebuilding contexts can be difficult.
However, the close links between climate change and fragility mean that it would be a mistake to ignore medium- and long-term adaptation needs in these peacebuilding contexts.
This guidance note examines how governments operating in peacebuilding contexts can initiate, finance, implement, monitor, evaluate, and learn from their NAP process in a way that understands and responds to peace and conflict dynamics. The resulting conflict-sensitive NAPs are aligned with a country’s peacebuilding and development objectives, actively promote peace, and work to minimize the risks that climate change and adaptation programming will contribute to conflict. The guidance note’s three primary objectives are as follows:
to outline the enabling factors required to design conflict-sensitive NAPs, namely leadership; data, knowledge, and communications; financing; institutional arrangements; stakeholder engagement; and skills and capacities;
to offer practical entry points to design NAP processes whose main phases are aligned with peacebuilding objectives;
to provide examples of how countries are integrating conflict and peacebuilding considerations into their NAP processes.
The IISD Model Contract Clauses for Responsible Investment in Agriculture represent IISD's vision of comprehensive legal language designed with sustainable development at its core.
Robust domestic laws are the best way to govern much-needed investments in agriculture, but sometimes they fall short. IISD's Model Contract Clauses help governments design responsible investment contracts that fill the gaps and advance sustainable development.
IISD has distilled international guidance, principles, and best practices on responsible agricultural investment into user-friendly, customizable contract clauses to help policy-makers ensure our agrifood systems can provide adequate food for all.
The IISD Model Contract Clauses for Responsible Investment in Agriculture represent IISD’s vision of comprehensive legal language for an agricultural investment contract that is designed with sustainable development at its core. They distil the body of guidance, principles, and best practices on responsible agricultural investment into user-friendly, customizable contract provisions.
The IISD Model Contract Clauses are intended to support agricultural investment negotiators, state lawyers, and policy-makers to advance their country’s sustainable development objectives through promoting responsible investment in their agriculture and food systems.
The IISD Model Contract Clauses address issues relating to gender and climate change, with cross-cutting provisions designed to reinforce gender equity and to promote a just and equitable transition toward more climate-resilient production practices.
The mining sector is at the nexus of important global phenomena: climate change and the push to transition to a low-carbon energy, the development of new technologies affecting labour markets, and global momentum against inequality and for tax reforms. These trends are raising the importance of mining both for its mineral and financial outputs. In this context, governments need new and innovative fiscal measures to protect the public’s financial interests during the next generation of resource extraction.
The IGF partnered with the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) to rethink how developing countries benefit financially from their mineral resources. They launched The Future of Resource Taxation in 2020, a research project to discover how the existing system of mining taxation can be improved and identify new, innovative fiscal options for resource-rich countries to maximize the returns from their mineral wealth. The project crowdsourced and developed policy ideas from governments, civil society, academia, and industry. The end result is this handbook for policy-makers: The Future of Resource Taxation: 10 Policy Ideas to Mobilize Mining Revenues, which presents a menu of innovative fiscal measures to strengthen revenue collection in the mining sector.
Video Playlist | Policy Ideas in Two Minutes
The Future of Resource Taxation: A roadmap
This preliminary framework document explains the rationale for the IGF and ATAF's work on The Future of Resource Taxation. The roadmap is available in English, French, and Spanish.
A Guide for Developing Countries on How to Understand and Adapt to the Global Minimum Tax
This guide provides policy-makers in developing countries with a simple framework to understand how the 15% global minimum corporate tax may affect them and how to adapt domestic tax policy in response.
A global minimum tax has great potential to combat tax competition and help governments collect their fair share of revenue from multinational corporations. The world has never seen a concept like the proposed 15% global corporate tax that has garnered support from more than 140 nations.
At least two dozen countries are preparing to implement the 15% minimum tax on worldwide corporate income in 2024. In response, many nations will need to adapt their domestic policies to protect their tax base. This is especially true of developing economies and in cases where incentives have lowered tax rates below the global minimum rate.
A Guide for Developing Countries on How to Understand and Adapt to the Global Minimum Tax provides policy-makers in developing countries with a simple framework to understand the global minimum tax, how it may affect their economies, and how to adapt their domestic tax policy in response to these new tax rules under Pillar Two of the Global Anti-Base Erosion (GloBE) initiative advanced by the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS.
This guide is co-published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the International Senior Lawyers Project.
