Burkina Faso: Water security as a priority of the national climate change adaptation process

Burkina Faso is a Sahelian country with a fragile economy that increases the vulnerability of its people to the adverse effects of climate change. Aware of these serious threats, the government of Burkina Faso signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1993 and the Kyoto Protocol in 2005. In the same year, it engaged the country in the process of formulating and implementing the National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) to climate variability and change in order to address the urgent need for Adaptation to Climate Change (ACC). Subsequently, the government decided to develop the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) to reduce vulnerability to the impacts of climate change by building adaptive and resilience capacities and to facilitate coherent integration of ACC into policies, programmes or activities, planning processes as well as into sectoral strategies at different levels.

The NAP development process was conducted from November 2012 to May 2015 according to the UNFCCC guidelines and accounted for the results of climate change vulnerability analysis of the priority sectors identified, the climate change scenarios for the 2025-2050 and the achievements of the NAPA implementation.

In order to place water, the main vector for through which the effects of climate change (drought, floods) are felt, at the centre of adaptation strategies, the GWP-WA has worked to ensure that water security is taken into account in Burkina Faso’s NAP. This integration was achieved through the implementation of the WACDEP, a programme designed in response to the request of the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW) in 2009 inviting GWP to support the implementation of the Sharm El Sheikh Declaration on Water and Sanitation, adopted in 2008 by the African Union.

The initiation of WACDEP in Burkina Faso came in 2012 when the NAP formulation process had already started: the Country Water Partnerships of Burkina Faso (CWP-BF) had assessed the level of integration of water in the development process at national level by commissioning a study on water security and climate resilience which concluded a lack of integration in development planning. GWP-WA therefore identified the NAP development process already underway as one of the entry points to achieve this. The CWP-BF then initiated close collaboration with the Ministry of Water and engaged in exchanges with the coordination of the NAP development process, anchored within the Ministry of the Environment through the Permanent Secretariat of the National Council for Sustainable Development (SP/CONEDD, now SP/CNDD). These exchanges revealed the need to mobilise additional expertise and financial resources to carry out the baseline study on integrating the water issue and to lead the consultations for a quality contribution from the stakeholders concerned.

The NAP was adopted by the government of Burkina Faso in October 2015 after a participatory process involving stakeholders in the water and climate sectors. The NAP is an annex of the PNDES, the national reference framework for development actions in Burkina Faso for the period 2016-2020. A communication document on the NAP25 development process and its importance was published by the SP/CONEDD with the technical and financial support of the CWP-BF. It highlights the contribution from partners, including GWP-WA. The final NAP document integrated water as a key element of sustainable development at regional and national levels as well as short-, medium- and long-term measures for economic growth and human security in Burkina Faso. The adoption of the NAP has also allowed the issue of climate change and investments related to water security to be given greater prominence in the 2016- 2020 PNDES, which requires an integrated and sustainable management approach.

The approach adopted by the CWP-BF for the integration of water security into the NAP has enabled all categories of stakeholders to play their role more effectively. The quality of this collaboration was subsequently confirmed with:

• the accompaniment by GWP-WA of the accreditation process of the Environmental Response Fund (FIE) by the Green Climate Fund;
• the involvement of the WACDEP Burkina Faso Programme Officer among the members of the Burkinabe delegation at the Bonn Conference on Climate Change in 2017 (COP23).

Activities included in the NAP and implemented are capitalised in a global report of October 2017. However, this report notes that implementation is rather slow and inefficient due to difficulties related to organisational issues, among others:

• insufficient synergy between the various actors and structures with the same interests;
• insufficient monitoring and evaluation of sectoral NAPs and the NAP;
• the lack of a framework for coordinating and guiding NAP actions;
• the difficulty of collecting data relating to the implementation of the NAP.

A 2019 assessment by NAP stakeholders using the Stocktaking for National Adaptation Planning (SNAP) tool, which has seven criteria for assessing the success of ACC planning, shows that monitoring and evaluation and stakeholder participation capacities are weak, with values below 2 on a scale of 0-4. The criteria relating to climate information, human capacity, integration and the long-term vision and mandate for the NAP process were assessed at a medium level.