Submission Deadline:  Friday 9 October 2020, 5.30pm (AEST)

The Australian Water Partnership (AWP) is looking for a small, multi-disciplinary team to identify opportunities to address the challenges of water-food system interactions in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and future resilience of the Pacific.

Activity Background

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored an urgent need for a future-oriented, robust and innovative approach to water resources management for food security in the Pacific. While there is much technical work done in various aspects of water and sanitation and water resources management in the region, this tends to be ad-hoc, project-specific, and with very limited capacity, staff or sustainability of outcomes. Water resources and agricultural management is often done from different technical sectors, despite their intricate co-dependence. National governments work towards meeting the needs of their citizens through different programs and policies, and there is an opportunity to situate country-level details within a regional systems change perspective. The fragmentation of evidence from the region thus requires efforts to start defining more systemic approaches to food security and water resources management.

Given the COVID-19 impact on regional economies and the subsequent impact on food security and water resource demands, AWP seeks to understand opportunities for developing interventions that can support Pacific development in water and food as an integrated system.

Activity Description

This project is designed to support AWP in identifying opportunities to address the challenges of water-food system interactions in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the future resilience of the Pacific. This challenge is especially urgent considering the sudden, deep and ongoing socio-economic shocks caused by COVID-19. Due to the urgency, this activity is deliberately rapid and small-scale, yet it will provide a series of future investment options for water-related activities to support food security in the Pacific in the longer term.

The outputs of this project will provide applicable and scalable interventions to support water-food nexus work in the Pacific within different time horizons. Core to the work will be the analysis of water-food priorities for Pacific water and food security from a systems perspective.

The overarching objective of this project is to determine how water resource management for food security can help support the resilience of Pacific food systems to future shocks. The project has two sub-objectives. First, it will assess the changing policy context of water and food security in light of COVID-19 shocks in the Pacific. Second, it will identify areas for future water interventions that can integrate water and food security outcomes in the region.

The budget limit is AU$95,000 (excl. GST) including remuneration and expenses. This activity will be desk-based, with no required travel. Further description of the activity is outlined in the Terms of Reference provided in Annex A.

View full details and eligibility/selection criteria here.