Like all communities, the IWRA community has also been impacted by COVID-19. But as an international community, we have all been impacted in quite different ways. This pandemic has not however stopped us from collaborating to identify the impacts of this pandemic on water resource management. As a result, we have produced a number of outputs in recent months that we hope will be useful to all of our members, and to the wider water resource management world:

• IWRA recently held a webinar on “Water and COVID-19”.  The recording of this is published on our website.
• On the back of the webinar we have also produced COVID-19 policy brief entitled “COVID-19 challenges the water sector”
• We are also starting to see an increase in COVID-19 articles in our journal Water International, including a recent COVID-19 Commentary Series (Volume 45, Issue 5 & Issue 7-8) and
  • “COVID-19 ‘free water’ initiatives in the Global South: what does the Ghanaian case mean for equitable and sustainable water services?”. G. Amankwaa & E. F. Ampratwum
  • “Water law and the response to COVID-19”. Rhett Larson
  • “Exploring challenges in safe water availability and accessibility in preventing COVID-19 in refugee settlements”. N. Rafa, S. M. Nazim Uddin & C. Staddon
  • “Water insecurity compounds the global coronavirus crisis”. C. Staddon , M. Everard , J. Mytton , T. Octavianti , W. Powell , N. Quinn , S. M. N. Uddin , S. L. Young , J. D. Miller , J. Budds , J. Geere, K. Meehan , K. Charles , E. G. J. Stevenson , J. Vonk & J. Mizniak
  • “The potential impact of water quality on the spread and control of COVID-19 in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon”. Issmat I. Kassem & Hadi Jaafar
  • “The impact of COVID-19 on water and food systems: flattening the much bigger curve ahead”. Martin Keulertz, Mark Mulligan & John Anthony Allan
  • “COVID-19 and water resources management: reframing our priorities as a water sector”. Marian J. Neal
  • “COVID-19 heightens water problems around the world”. Cecilia Tortajada & Asit K. Biswas

As most of you know, the biggest impact of COVID-19 for IWRA has been the postponement of our XVII World Water Congress from May 2020 to September 12-16, 2021, in Daegu, South Korea. The theme is still on “Foundations for Global Water Security and Resilience: Knowledge, Technology and Policy” but we have also introduced a new subtheme on “Responding to a crisis: lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic”.