Improving governance in transboundary cooperation in water and climate change adaptation

Abstract

Climate change adaptation in water management is a water governance issue. While neither climate change nor water respects national borders, adaptation in water management should be treated as a transboundary water governance issue. However, transboundary water management is, in essence, more complex than national water management because the water management regimes usually differ more between countries than within countries. This paper provides 63 lessons learned from almost a decade of cooperation on transboundary climate adaptation in water management under the UNECE Water Convention and puts these into the context of the OECD principles on water governance. It highlights that good water governance entails a variety of activities that are intertwined and cannot be considered stand-alone elements. The paper also shows that this wide variety of actions is needed to develop a climate change adaptation strategy in water management. Each of the lessons learned can be considered concrete actions connected to one or more of the OECD principles, where a range of actions may be needed to fulfil one principle. The paper concludes that developing climate change adaptation measures needs to improve in parallel the water governance system at transboundary scale.

Pitfalls in transboundary Indus Water Treaty: a perspective to prevent unattended threats to the global security

“…The issues of transboundary river treaties within the paradigm of climate change have been discussed in the literature. 59 However, resolving these issues through a TF has never been the part of any discussion despite the fact that the climate change related research yielded ground breaking conclusions in the recent decades. The scientists identified regions around the globe which are potentially going to be worst affected by the climate change.…”

When the water runs dry: supporting adaptive governance in transboundary river basins

“…Scholars have also argued that data and information sharing at the river basin level (e.g., through a river basin organization) is important for successful river basin planning and management (e.g., Gerlak et al, 2011;Meijerink & Huitema, 2017) and particularly significant for addressing climate change (Schulze & Schmeier, 2012;Timmerman et al, 2017). These authors generally argue that sharing or jointly generating data and information leads to an improved and mutual understanding of the causes, expected future developments, and impacts of environmental changes and ultimately supports agreement on how to approach or solve a certain problem.…”

The role of shared water management to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

“…However, shared water management heavily depends on the circumstances at the national level. For example, poor legal and policy frameworks and bad management practices have the potential to amplify by differences between riparian countries (in the case of transboundary water) (13.2) (Feng et al, 2019;Timmerman et al, 2017;Whalley and Faloutsos, 2020). Therefore, capacity building (on climate change mitigation and other topics) is a key component of the shared water management activities which shows an important synergy with the target (13.3) (Whalley and Faloutsos, 2020).…”