Developing a national water security indicators framework in Kazakhstan

Water security is a matter of great national importance for Kazakhstan, with its Security Council meeting on 26 June 2019 devoted to “Ensuring Water Security”. This paper presents recent progress in Kazakhstan with regard to identifying water security priorities and establishing indicators to monitor and measure progress towards achieving water security. The paper also analyses those water security indicators that simultaneously relate to the “nationalised” Green Growth Indicators (GGIs) and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators that are relevant to water security, and also identifies opportunities for complimentary indicators to be developed to track the full suite of water security targets. The paper identifies remaining challenges for future work in this domain, including improving data collection and reporting; and integrating water security indicators into relevant policy documents, strategies and plans to secure the technical and political attention necessary to drive progress in this domain.