Shared Risk, Shared Vision: Lessons from the Middle East to New York

Last week, I was in Washington, DC, for the first time since before Covid-19 began. Ingrid and I had a variety of meetings, with old friends and new. The sense that climate is driving water issues now was both vivid and constant.

Perhaps the most striking example came from some AGWA partners based in the Middle East who happened to be in DC at the same time. EcoPeace Middle East bridges (and is co-directed by) colleagues in Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. We had a private meeting together before a more general briefing about their work and how their organization has changed over the past two decades.

Water — especially around the Jordan River — has been at the center of their work from their founding. The Levant is one of the most tense and geopolitically fraught regions of the past century, and EcoPeace has tried hard to use practical interventions and shared values for natural resources, economic development, and ecosystem management as the basis for cooperation. What has changed over time, according to all of the directors, is that climate risk over water resources is a new concern all three countries are sharing.

A shared sense of fear need not result in solidarity. I’ve written before about “castle adaptation,” which is when individual institutions respond to climate risk by building higher walls to increase their isolation and reduce interdependence. Yet here in the Levant large majorities within these countries want their leaders to cooperate around water and climate resilience issues. My sense at the end of three hours of listening is that EcoPeace Middle East has fundamentally become a water resilience organization, developing a new generation of programs designed to promote a shared regional vision for resilient development, increase technical capacity on adaptation (especially for young professionals), and support infrastructure systems that promote interdependence and co-management. These messages are powerful, even moving. They are an example of how we should rise to important challenges.

In contrast, we’ve been watching the UN Water processes in advance of the conference next March, particularly several days of agenda setting meetings in New York this week. Almost every speaker mentioned the prominence of climate change as a driver of institutions and issues. However, I have also been struck by how few speakers went to the next level of awareness: that shared sense of risk is arguably the only blue thread that connects all of the water community. Indeed, given that water resilience is a new idea, still trickling through the water community, a shared response and set of values could connect us all. The climate agenda can no longer be distinguished from the water agenda, and both communities have much work to do. Yet this second message was almost completely absent from New York. Divided into silos and the inability to update our approaches for a new century and era, the water community will surely fall—and fall behind. Other people will set our agendas for us.

I hope we can embrace climate as more than a threat and follow the leadership of our colleagues and friends in the Jordan Valley to see water resilience as an our common mission for this century.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA