Policy Newsletter: December 2022

Greetings! 

COP27 is well over, and in fact most of the reflections on COP27 are over at this stage too. I’m already planning at least one trip to the Persian Gulf in early 2023 in preparation for COP28. We will be eager to hear your reflections next week in both our Euro-Americas-Africa and Asia-Pacific-Australia calls next week (see below!). 

For fairness, you might wonder what our thoughts are on the COP27: did water’s position improve this year? Where are we as a community in the COP?

I’ve never been one to just count up the number of times that water was mentioned and call that progress. If that was our scorecard, we could have declared victory four or five years ago when the majority of NDCs already mentioned water. If I keep repeating “rain” out loud, I am unlikely to see any corresponding precipitation events unless I am standing in my shower. What we need to listen for is how water is described and who is talking about water — and what people are doing with investments and how they define and implement projects, especially non-water sector projects.

From that perspective, the COP negotiations made some modest progress. Water as a cross-sectoral asset and reservoir of resilience is more explicitly mentioned for the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), and this broader usage of water is also more clear in many NDCs. We seem likely to see water come up a lot in the Global Stocktake (GST) in 2023 too. Many development finance institutions are also trying to turn Paris Alignment into a process — one that includes a river journey. The negotiations have a centralizing tendency that means that the discussions deepen and evolve over time.

In contrast, to use the terminology of a recent blog Ingrid and I wrote, the messages from the COP27 “trade show” or “climate change expo” are much more diffuse than the negotiations and not a clear sign of progress. Water was often mentioned in the climate expo, but there is no centralizing tendency. I have a hard time seeing real improvement or progress around water and climate issues beyond some isolated events. 

In fact, I think there are still some widespread conceptual gaps. Climate resilience is not an engineering problem. In the words of AGWA board member Paul Fleming, we need at least as much management science as climate science for effective resilience — and probably a lot more management science in terms of our decision making frameworks. That doesn’t mean there weren’t some good sessions, talks, and breakthroughs outside of the negotiations. The Water Pavilion helped socialize some new people to the COP. But water resilience still seemed trapped in the corners and cracks instead of flooding the tents. Each year, we need to ask anew: How can water advance the COP process? How can the water community enable and support the climate community? That’s the ongoing challenge for all of us.

John H. Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA