On March 10, 2026, when Prof. Shahbaz Khan, Director and Representative of the UNESCO Regional Office for East Asia, and Dr. Ai Sugiura, Program Specialist for Natural Sciences, paid a courtesy visit to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), a meeting was held at MLIT with the JWA’s International Affairs Division, which serves as the NARBO Secretariat, to discuss the revision of the IWRM Guidelines.
The IWRM Guidelines were first created by UNESCO and NARBO in 2009 and have been referenced by relevant organizations around the world due to their excellent contents on IWRM.
However, UNESCO and NARBO decided to revise them considering the increasing need to address the vulnerability of water security due to climate change since then, and also the increasing sophistication of the sharing and utilization of related scientific and technological information of recent date thanks to various technological innovations such as AI, etc.
During the meeting, the participants exchanged views on the redefinition of key terms used in the current Guidelines and aligned their understanding of the overall direction for the upcoming revision.
Although the dialogue between UNESCO and NARBO has only just begun, further progress is expected toward the development of the updated IWRM Guidelines.
