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Despite significant achievements in climate adaptation research and growing insights from knowledge transfers from science to practice, information on best practice examples is difficult to access. This impedes and slows down sustainability transformations in many parts of the world, including countries in the Global South where a wide range of development challenges coincide with strong impacts of climate change.

Co-hosted by Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden), one of the eleven universities of excellence in Germany, and United Nations University, this side event provides a platform to discuss how scientific advances in the field of water security and climate adaptation can be turned into a driver of climate adaptation in society, policy and the community of practice.

The aim is to bring together experiences and insights from multilateral, transnational and interdisciplinary initiatives and to analyze their strategies to close the gaps between knowledge generation, dissemination and best practice application.

Two worldwide networks will provide a solid basis for a global perspective on initiatives reducing the time lag between development and implementation as well as to efficiently distribute findings to problem owners.

i) The Global Water and Climate Adaptation Centre deals with climate adaptation measures in the Global South, especially in the water sector. It connects leading institutions of research and higher education in its partner countries (Germany, India, Thailand) to stakeholders from the water sector, national policy and the UN system, and aims to establish a global model for the advancement of climate adaptation through dialogue and knowledge transfer between academia, society and policy.

ii) The Centre for International Postgraduate Studies of Environmental Management (CIPSEM) has been implementing a UNEP/UNESCO/BMUV course program on environmental management for change agents in the Global South for 45 years. As this center has produced more than 2600 alumni from 145 countries, it has not only created a global network of sustainability experts, but also forms a strong basis for analyzing the potentials and barriers for knowledge transfer from academia into practice and policy.

This session aims to accumulate insights of experiences regarding accessibility of information of climate adaptation measures for water security and seeks to jointly identify entry points for overcoming the described disparities by improving ongoing activities in academia and application, as well as draft novel concepts for forthcoming proposals. Our goal is to induce a common initiative to build up a global data base success and failure cases