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Water security is critical for sustainable economic development, poverty reduction and climate change 
adaptation. Ecosystem services need to be linked more directly and clearly into water infrastructure development, for climate change adaptation and integration into water, food and energy security.
WISE-UP aimed to tackle these challenges by demonstrating the application of natural infrastructure as a ‘nature-based solution’ for climate change adaptation and sustainable development in the Volta and Tana River Basins of West and East Africa respectively.
Combining Built and Natural Infrastructure
The project generated new knowledge and innovative tools on optimising built (eg. dams, levees, irrigation channels) and natural (eg. wetlands, floodplains, watersheds) infrastructure and piloted their application by decision-makers and stakeholders engaged in climate change adaptation planning and river basin development, setting investment strategies for water infrastructure and dialogue over water resource management.
WISE-UP ran for a four-year period (2013-2017) and linked ecosystem services more directly into water infrastructure development in the Tana (Kenya) and Volta (Ghana-Burkina Faso) river basins.
Project Partners
The project was coordinated by a global partnership that brought together the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Ghana (CSIR), The African Collaborative Center for Earth System Sciences (ACCESS) - University of Nairobi, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), the University of Manchester, the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The project was funded by the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB)
