b) Country Report Workshop

Half-day workshop by invited papers concerning items such as: the appropriate indices to describe and quantify the  implication of drought and aridity, drought impact assessments, appropriate policies and management strategies for drought mitigation. The workshop will be held in Montpellier 2003.The WG members are strongly recommended to provide papers related to their experiences in their own countries related to the aforementioned subject areas. FAO will also present papers in this workshop.


c) International Workshop on Rain Water Harvesting and Sustainable Agriculture

WG-IADWS organized an international workshop, jointly with FAO, on “Water Harvesting and Sustainable Agriculture” during 55th ICID-IEC meeting in Moscow (7 Sep.2004). There were 32 abstracts accepted out of 63 abstracts submitted to the secretarial by technical committee of the workshop. 20 full papers were received, but only 10 authors could manage to come to Moscow and present their papers. Papers were essentially related to the planning, implementation and evaluation aspects of runoff farming systems and groundwater recharge systems. Presentation included lessons learned and profiles of activities from international agencies (FAO, ICARDA, IWMI) as well as research results from research centers, universities and water authorities from countries such as Iran, south Africa, Ethiopia, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, India and Eritrea. Miss. I. Beernearts from FAO presented a paper on “Coping with Water Scarcity in (Semi) arid Areas” which was welcomed by the participants at the workshop. The proceeding of the workshop is uploaded on the WG-IADWS web pages.

The interested readers are invited to visit this web page.