The Water, Energy, Land-use Nexus programme in Central Asia and the Green Central Asia programme facilitated active discussion on how to enhance cooperation between the water and energy sectors across the region.
The Fifth Regional Working Group Meeting convened over 50 participants from Central Asian line ministries, regional institutions, development partners and academic institutions. This Meeting was devoted to discussing existing water, energy and climate models and how they can better support decision-making on water and energy co-operation among Central Asian countries. Discussion points included the needs of countries and regional organisations in Central Asia for models or tools and the specific capacity of those models or tools to address the country needs.
Key messages from the event:
- Extensive modelling work is developed and available in the region, with wider institutional uptake seen as the next meaningful priority.
- Significant needs exist to extend training and lay the groundwork to convey results of the modelling work to the leadership in water and energy ministries in the region.
- Tackling data scarcity and availability issues remains an integral part of water-energy coordination discussions, in addition to economic benefit
- Digitalisation of water management, in particular integration of AI and machine learning into optimisation processes is an area of interest, necessitating further deliberation and cooperation between Central Asian countries
- Energy efficiency continues to be a crucial concern, both in current water-energy coordination methods and in future potential model integration considerations
Further information about this event can be found here.