The UN Day highlights the urgent need to preserve glaciers amid the global water crisis. IDOS experts are tackling this issue in various ways, exploring global water governance solutions and calling for global action.
The theme of this year’s World Water Day on 22 March is glacier preservation. It underlines the crucial relevance glaciers have in the global water system and the urgent need to protect glaciers, as their rapid melting exacerbates the global water crisis, threatening billions who rely on seasonal meltwater. The IDOS current column points out that beyond water security, glacier loss fuels climate instability, disrupts ecosystems, and increases humanitarian crises. This is one aspect of the global water crisis, which also manifests itself in limited access, pollution and overuse as well as droughts and flooding. About half of the world’s population struggles with severe water shortages at some time of the year and 2.2 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water. As a consequence, tensions over water increase worldwide, making the need for sustainable, effective and just water management and governance more important than ever.
The IDOS research group on water governance contributes to the discussions on improved water governance at all levels, from the global to the local. While sustainable water management and governance was long perceived as a problem of local, regional or basin level, recently its global level has been increasingly acknowledged: Water issues are closely related to trade, climate change and biodiversity as well as with other sectors such as agriculture, health and energy. This connectedness across levels is reflected in concepts such as precipitation sheds and atmospheric rivers and the relevance of water for all 17 SDGs. In her contribution to the report ‘water in a heated world’ by the German Advisory Council on Global Change report, IDOS director Prof. Anna-Katharina Hornidge analyses the connections between local, national and global water challenges.
In particular, the implementation of SDG 6 on sustainable management of water and sanitation for all is severely off track and efforts for achieving it will have to be significantly scaled up. This urgency for action was reflected in the 2023 United Nations Water Conference – the first in 46 years. In their scientific comment in Water International, members of the IDOS water team assess the outcomes of the conference and their implications for the current and future global water governance architecture. They argue that it is important to recognise water as a global commons and improve the global water governance architecture, e.g. by legitimising and extending the reach of global water governance, implementing and monitoring global water commitments, addressing the cross-sectoral nature of water and improving the science–policy–society interface. A recent online event by the Bonn Water Network contributed to further discuss the potential and challenges of global water governance.
The water crisis is also at the centre of a publication in Nature Water, that IDOS contributed to and which identifies seven strategies to leverage water for peace and foster sustainable and just water management for all. To prevent conflict over water resources it calls for global action, participative water governance, involving local knowledge on nature-based solutions, creating win-win solutions by embedding water in many different sectors, intergovernmental management of transboundary rivers, providing safe access to water for all as well as improved disaster preparedness and resilience.
One region, where tensions over water have intensified since the break-up of the Soviet Union is Central Asia. A scientific article co-authored by IDOS water experts analyses the current challenges in Central Asian water governance. It argues for increasing the flexibility and resilience of water governance instead of a focus on efficiency and technical solutions and for developing the scientific and research architecture to be better able to provide policy advice and support the needed technical and institutional reforms, e.g. through applied research, improved collaboration, innovation and interdisciplinary thinking. To achieve this, establishing a Central Asian Expert Platform on Water Security, Sustainable Development, and Future Studies is proposed.
Other IDOS water researchers contributed to a case study of local water management, which analyses responsible governance of water tenure on Ethiopia’s Awash river basin. It calls for balancing economic growth with social equity and environmental sustainability through inclusive governance, e.g. through a comprehensive approach to water tenure that incorporates both formal and customary rights, aligning governance with the „leave no one behind“ principle of the 2030 Agenda.
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