Brazil is at the forefront of a new era in integrating artificial intelligence with climate policy analysis. As a country with both abundant water resources and extreme climate variability, Brazil faces vastly diverse regional water challenges. Addressing these challenges requires water management to be embedded in adaptive, cross-sectoral policies while ensuring it is also deeply integrated within sector-specific approaches. To meet this need, Brazil’s National Water and Basin Sanitation Agency (ANA) is working with the Water Resilience Tracker (WRT), a powerful diagnostic framework designed to identify policy gaps and align water and climate strategies across sectors for maximum impact.
Backed by funding from the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), the WRT is gaining momentum in Brazil. It is further expanding thanks to regional support from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Strategic Center of Excellence in Water and Drought Policies (CEPAS) at the Federal University of Ceará, which will strengthen WRT’s long-term sustainability in the country.
WRT 2.0 in Brazil kicked off on March 26 with a workshop held in Brasilia with ANA, the Ministério do Meio Ambiente e Mudança do Clima (Ministry of Environment and Climate Change) and WRT 2.0 consortium members from the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). The workshop built on the successes of WRT 1.0 in the country, focusing on how the WRT can be applied in specific contexts, such as in basin management plans, and integrated into a broader range of policy instruments.
WRT’s First Phase
The WRT 1.0 phase, which recently concluded, guided national officials from ANA through 53 questions spanning four critical areas: (1) Water in National Climate Plans, (2) Water in National Planning and Governance, (3) Water-Climate Connections in Specific Sectors and (4) Links to Climate Financing and Project Implementation. The national officials analyzed eight of their general and sectoral plans, determining whether these plans strongly support, partially support, or omit key water-related priorities.
Parsing through hundreds of pages of policy documents across multiple sectors is time-consuming and requires seamless communication between experts. To streamline this process, the consulting team from CEPAS pioneered an innovative dual approach that combines artificial intelligence with human expertise, reducing inefficiencies, speeding up the WRT process and enhancing accuracy in climate policy assessment.
First, the CEPAS team introduced a natural language processing tool that processes vast amounts of policy documents. This was fed into the AI system, which then analyzed the text and provided responses on whether the content contained sufficient evidence to answer key policy questions. In the second stage, this process was tested and checked by analysts, who reviewed the answers generated for their assigned document, correcting and adjusting evidence and classification. This was repeated twice by two different analysts.
The synthesized results identified strengths, gaps and areas for improvement in Brazil’s climate policies across the four key areas. For example, in the Water in National Planning and Governance section, AI flagged gaps in legal and institutional frameworks, highlighting the need for more flexible mechanisms to adapt to evolving climate evidence. The WRT recommended greater inclusion of civil society, businesses and local governments to strengthen policy implementation. In the Links to Climate Financing and Project Implementation section, the analysis revealed no consistent approach to climate-specific funding in Brazil. Based on this finding, the WRT advised improved coordination between financing and project implementation to clearly identify funding needs and available resources.
Moving forward with WRT’s second phase
As the WRT evolves alongside governments, it continues to increase the precision of its analysis, shifting from a broad climate focus to a more detailed, water-specific approach. In Brazil, this means the explicit inclusion of water resilience in national climate plans, including the creation of a sectoral National Adaptation Plan (NAP) for water, expanding to basin-level assessments that provide tailored insights for local policymakers and supporting the revision of basin management plans.
The use of novel AI technology in the implementation of the WRT in Brazil is a result of WRT’s collaboration with the University of Ceará in Fortaleza. “It has been a great learning experience for the WRT team and really exemplifies what we set out to do with the WRT from the start, which has been to support the advancement of water resilience at all levels and facilitate shared learning. To ensure that others can benefit from this innovation, we will be working with our Brazilian colleagues to integrate the use of new technologies into the WRT going forward,” says Ingrid Timboe, deputy executive director and senior policy specialist at AGWA. IWMI, AGWA, Deltares and Arup are WRT’s global implementing partners.
Brazil’s innovations with the WRT are not only strengthening its own policies but also laying the groundwork for other countries to follow. Lessons learned on expanding funding, with groups like IDB and CEPAS, show us additional avenues for leveraging partnerships to maximize impact. As WRT 2.0 implementation begins across numerous other countries, the WRT team will explore ways in which lessons learnt from Brazil’s AI integration trial can be replicated to support the wider adoption of the WRT. This effort will contribute overall to improving water and climate planning instruments and enhancing resilience on a global scale.