Momentum for Interlinked UN Events: UN 2023 Water Conference and GST
Blog from John Matthews, AGWA’s Executive Director.
Please consider my words as an invitation and proposal for how we can work together, particularly through the UN Water and UNFCCC meetings this year.
I am both a water and a climate scientist. I began working on climate impacts in 2003 before expanding to explore operational adaptation and resilience issues globally. In 2010, I co-founded a group called AGWA, or the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation, which I continue to lead. AGWA is an international transdisciplinary network that looks at the operational, technical, and policy aspects of water resilience and crowdsources policy and technical solutions.
The UN Water meeting this March in New York is the first major UN convening on water issues in almost 50 years. The open planning meetings for UN Water held a few months ago were intriguing — almost every intervention out of all the hundreds there began by referencing climate impacts, especially climate extremes like floods and droughts. California and Pakistan came up a lot! A sense of fear and concern, even dread, unites the water community around climate change.
There is also a deeper awareness I believe that many in water sense that our proposed solutions are deeply challenged by climate change. Concepts that we’ve advocated around water sharing and transboundary governance, data, and monitoring, IWRM, the water-food-energy nexus, and even environmental initiatives like environmental flows and riparian governance often require profound reworking to bring in a water resilience perspective.
But while climate is a challenge for how we manage water, water resilience is also a positive direction for us to move in and towards. Water resilience is a family of approaches that assume that we cannot and will not have a high level of certainty about how the water cycle will evolve in the future. We must develop our systems with robustness to impacts we know are coming as well as flexibility for the uncertainties we cannot resolve. Water resilience also views water as a connector rather than as a sector — a connector between human and natural systems, and between sectors and ministries as diverse as energy agriculture cities and human and ecological health. Interestingly, the IPCC recognized this connection in AR6 last March, when one of their top line messages was that most adaptation should be “water-based,” a recommendation that AGWA was deeply appreciative to hear given that the IPCC can by no means be described as a member of the water community.
I am as much a climate person as a water person, and I’ve been attending UNFCCC COPs since 2009. I was a proud member of the Moroccan delegation in 2016 when I co-chaired the first Water Day in the COP process. Before Glasgow’s COP26 about 14 months ago and in partnership with the UNFCCC, I had personally advised some 100 countries on water issues relevant to their NDCs, and we continue to partner closely with the UNFCCC secretariat and subsidiary agencies and bodies on several issues.
The GST, or Global Stocktake, is a major development within the COP process for countries to explore their progress with their national climate plans and commitments — the NDCs, or Nationally Determined Contributions. Since 2021, AGWA has also been working steadily and intensively with about two dozen countries through a grant supported by the UK’s FCDO and the Netherlands Ministry for Infrastructure and Water Management to develop a much deeper and more systematic approach to water resilience, using NDCs as a starting point but deepening these processes to a much lower level of processes and applications within and across governments. NDCs are the starting point but not where we end. We are using water resilience to develop climate coherence across ministries. We call this the Water Tracker for National Climate Planning.
The Water Tracker is a demand-driven process — countries reach out to us often and regularly because they recognize that most of their climate problems are water problems, and water issues that span ministries, administrative boundaries, and sectors. We constrain water within borders, but the water itself doesn't respect boundaries. Indeed, our largest issue with the Water Tracker right now is managing the scale of the demand we face. The climate community — and often at quite high levels within governments — needs water resilience as a solution that operates at the scale of the challenges and problems we face.
I am struck that, at least right now, the UN Water process has not created a clear focusing and cross-cutting component — one that can take account of the shared fears as well as the shared opportunity of water resilience. Climate change is consigned to a component of one of many pillars — climate is lumped with environmental issues, rather than as a fundamental replumbing of many core conceptual and operational aspects of how we have managed water resources. Moreover, UN Water remains at least partially locked within an SDG framework, especially SDG 6, which focuses primarily on water supply and sanitation for the poor. This is a deeply critical need but also a quite narrow focus for water, one that significantly reflects where the technical and operational landscape of water is headed. SDG 6 does not capture the crosscutting nature of water, nor the crisis in decision-making that climate change and climate uncertainty present as a challenge to how we manage water as a shared resource. Neither SDG 6 nor UN Water recognize this new country-driven demand for a water resilience revolution.
Within the NDCs, water is also often viewed as a threat and sometimes as a sector as well, but more and more we see countries viewing water as the most critical human medium for resilience. At the launch of the GST and the GGA (or global goal on adaptation) in Bonn last summer, you heard real and substantive concern about the trends — the countries are focused on the right issues, the big issues. They understand that NDCs can become the fundamental building block for a new vision of economic development. For the most part, they also see water as this combination of threat and solution.
Moreover, water resilience is even essential for climate mitigation, given that water often serves as the lock for how we sequester carbon and the most climate-sensitive variable for most energy production mechanisms.
My proposal? Rather than use UN Water to represent the full spectrum of the water community with SDG 6 as an organizing principle, perhaps we can use UN Water to align the water and climate communities in a way that can accelerate and complete the transformation that has started in both areas. Transform SDG 6 into a resilience development goal. Show how the water community can address the issues of the next 50 years, not the last 50. And show how the Paris Agreement can become the vehicle for enabling water-resilient economies, ecosystems, and communities. As Ambassador Khalil suggests, a major part of how we should progress with the UNFCCC should be through the GGA. We need to measure resilience. I believe many Parties want these measures to be indicators of water resilience.
Perhaps as a final point, I do not believe that the world is going to hell. If you work on adaptation and resilience, you must be an optimist, and I see remarkably positive changes occurring. My longevity in this space means that I am deeply moved by the amount of positive progress I have seen — truly, beyond my hopes. The outlines of a more positive future are, in my eyes, emerging. I believe that we need to do more than make the future less bad than it might otherwise be. De-risking is not enough.
Resilience goes beyond de-risking. I believe that we can prosper and thrive, even as the climate continues to evolve. That our children can learn to be adaptive managers and view our natural and managed systems as also evolving and flexible. I believe science supports these views. I look at my son, himself a climate refugee, and believe human systems support this view. And as a biologist and ecologist, I believe a long view of natural systems also supports this view. Our narrative should be about more than loss or endurance and should focus on transformation. Water should be the instrument of this process. And I see this shared mission developing, even if more slowly than I want. Consider me an impatient optimist. I am not preparing for the apocalypse.
We need the climate and water worlds to come together and to come together soon. Thank you for your time and attention.
John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA