Water security has rapidly emerged as a defining global and local challenge to promote economic growth, human development and resource sustainability. Achieving and maintaining water security requires balancing often competing goals in an increasingly complex landscape of demographic, climatic, environmental, political, economic and social change.

This three-day conference convenes leading global thinkers and practitioners from government, enterprise, civil society and academia to advance and debate risk-based analysis of water security. The first day assesses water security from the perspective of sustainable growth, based on the GWP/OECD report Securing Water, Sustaining Growth. The second and third days advance the risk-based framework for poverty alleviation with the launch of a DFID-funded programme REACH: Improving water security for the poor.

The conference will discuss how a risk-based framework charts pathways to sustainable growth and reduce poverty; review the state of water security knowledge in Africa and South Asia; help build a global science-practitioner partnership to design new approaches to sustainably deliver water security for millions of poor people.