Water in COP28: Consensus, Champions, Parties

For some years now, a month or two before COP I write a what-is-at-stake essay around water and climate issues. Ingrid has written a great state of play essay this year. I’d like to focus on strategy.

Many people I’ve spoken to in the water community are impatient, wondering why “we” don’t have more sway in the worlds of climate adaptation and resilience, much less climate mitigation, loss and damage, and climate finance. Often these concerns are phrased in some form of “Why aren’t they listening to us?” 

My sense is that there are three levels of engagement that a “sector” (which what the climate community calls any specialized domain, such as energy, oceans, agriculture, or cities) can reach with climate change professionals, especially in the policy space.

The highest, most significant level is one I would call agenda-setting. Clean energy systems like solar are probably the oldest and most enduring of these agenda-setting sectors. Forests reached that height in the late 1990s and early 2000s, especially with the early birth of forest carbon policy (i.e., REDD). The forest community has never really looked back — indeed, they have magnificently convinced the climate community that natural forests are significant reservoirs of carbon that need to be maintained and invested in. Oceans did something very similar in 2017, led in no small part by Fiji co-hosting of the COP that year. For 2023, agriculture seems to be showing real signs of of maturity, spurred in part by a widespread concern in countries concerned about the food crisis (and effectively an aid crisis) triggered by the loss of Ukraine’s exports in conjunction with some regional weather extremes.

A lower level of climate policy engagement is what I would call a service sector, characterized by a community making a clear and persuasive argument that this domain is capable of solving a clear climate policy problem or supporting an agenda-setting sector. In a good year, the water community has been good at making a case that it serves other priorities. Movements such as Water Initiative for Net Zero (WINZ), for instance, link water as an enabling or supporting mechanism for reduced emissions and effective sequestration. This year, many close watchers of the climate community have been trying to pitch water as a necessary contributor to agricultural and food system resilience — especially beyond a simple focus on irrigation. 

The most basic level for engaging with the COP, however, also shows a strong water connection: impacts and hazards. This category is prone to showing up in the opening remarks of a session or the first paragraph of a report but not getting much farther or in much more depth. I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard someone use the phrase “droughts and floods” at COP…. In a bad year, water is often stuck in this category. The lack of a clear and systematic solution and programmatic framework is emblematic of this category. I would translate this level of policy influence as weak if not inconsequential.

How do you move up the chain, from impact to service or agenda-setting? That’s a powerful question and one I will answer via rampant speculation. I think we need three essential ingredients: consensus, champions, and parties.

By consensus, I mean a shared sense from a “sector” of the key priorities and contributions to climate policy. The forest community, for instance, agreed that natural forests were stockpiles of carbon, that they could managed effectively for carbon storage and accumulation, and that climate finance was necessary to ensure that the integrity of those carbon stores were maintained. The science behind these priorities was arguably a little thin and perhaps oversold, but the rapid emergence of a consensus was critical for climate policy outcomes like the Kyoto Protocol. 

Champions matter too. Champions are notable individuals who are capable of making practical, powerful, and effective arguments to both policymakers and the broader public. Often champions are not native to the climate policy world but translators and bridge builders, communicating urgency while also reorganizing issues and showing how new solutions have emerged. Good champions become proficient in highlighting key sectoral issues. Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, Wangari Matthai have all been great champions for forests, for instance.

Finally, because the UNFCCC and COP processes are really about national governments, you need at least a handful of UNFCCC signatories to come forward, speak loudly, and press within the COP itself to make new policy. You need some noisy Parties. Ideally, these are countries who can also mobilize new resources. Brazil was critical in this space for forests, but so was Norway in terms of climate finance for REDD. My intuition is that no Parties will come forward unless the other two pieces are there first.

Water has never had any of these elements. Indeed, I find the lack of consensus in the water world to be one of the most concerning aspects, since we do not really even agree with each other about what the priorities for water and climate should be. There is no simple list of three or four points necessary to drive the champions and the parties. Such an outcome would have been timely from the UN Water Conference earlier this year, but if anything that conference showed us as disjointed and uncoordinated on climate issues. The answer to the question of “Why aren’t they listening to us” is that they are, and they can see that we don’t have any agreement. Worse, many of pockets of consensus seem oversold or irrelevant to the climate community. No champions have emerged. No Parties have stood up.

As water organizations and as a community, we need to organize ourselves before we expert more significant shifts at COP. Personally, I believe we can come together. In many cases, such a consensus also means showing that a lot of our current approaches to water does not help with either climate adaptation or climate mitigation and our institutions need to evolve as well. The best we can hope for — until we have consensus — is that we are effective enablers for other agendas.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA