World Water Week 2022- August 24, 2022 SIWI Seminar: Water as a driver for peace and cooperation

At this session at World Water Week, the central theme was how water works as a driver for peace and development from the legal perspective and how can unseen water contribute to cooperation at multiple levels across communities and across sectors.

Prof. Patricia Wouters spoke about how the codification of international water law in international conventions and treaties has provided governments with the peaceful means of resolving disputes. She referred to the UN Charter whereby states should seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, arbitration, and judicial settlement. She saw transboundary water management as a driver for peace by providing a baseline framework for a duty to cooperate and due diligence which contributes to equity. But where inevitably conflicts arise, dispute mechanisms help transboundary governing bodies to find solutions to those conflicts. Professor Wouters spoke of the need to support emerging water law leaders and innovation and the need to mainstream water law. To this aim she mentioned the engine of convergence as a gateway to cooperation to look at the layers of regulation in different branches of law such as economic law and climate change law. In the face of cascading challenges, she said international water law contributes to peace and development through its capacity to convene the various actors in a transboundary context and give them the tools to solve problems together. Professor Wouters provided examples of treaties such as arbitration to update the Indus Water Treaty, the Lancang-Mekong Agreement and the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty between the United States and Canada governing the transboundary waters of the two nations. More agreements are needed in Latin America. But she cautioned that looking at the severe droughts seen in major rivers like the Rhine, the Danube and the Yangzte, there could be hard tensions coming up. The issue of dams also needs to be addressed, do we keep building them or should they be decommissioned.

The opportunity for peaceful collaboration was echoed in the presentations of the other speakers who also provided some examples from their experiences. Professor Eckstein of the Texas A&M University spoke of the challenges of groundwater governance. Surface waters like rivers and lakes can be seen, but groundwater relies on multiple boreholes to be extracted and quantification is harder to measure. But groundwater also creates opportunities for collaboration across states, municipalities, communities, and sectors. He pointed out that currently there are 7 transboundary aquifer cooperative agreements for 450 transboundary aquifers.

Dr. Alice Aureli from UNESCO talked about the 5 accelerators for the SDG 6 (Optimized financing, Improved data and information, capacity building, innovation, and governance). The UN has launched the SDG 6 Global Acceleration Framework – an initiative that involves all sectors of society to speed up progress by improving support to countries as part of the UN Secretary-General’s Decade of Action to deliver the SDGs by 2030.

Dr. Luke Cole, Associate Director of the Santa Cruz River Program described a model of collaboration and conservation in a binational river between Mexico and the United States. The Santa Cruz River has the unique quality of flowing south to north due to the terrain and it crosses the border in two places. The water authority has successfully restored areas of the river which were considered dead and wastewater effluent is treated in 2 wastewater plants updated in 2010. Living River

Reports of 10-12 pages provide information to policy makers and to communities in the river basin. The Sonora Institute collects feedback from the community.

Yumiko Yasuda, PhD from the Global Water Partnership (GWP) spoke about the multi-stakeholder dialogues bringing together upstream and downstream communities. She said that upscaling the discussions to regional level can help to make the discussions more general and less conflictual. GWP had done case studies in Southeast Europe, South Asia and South Africa which will soon be published in the GWP toolbox.

Yelysaveta (Lisa) Demydenko also from the GWP talked about the youth actions and the importance of increasing the participation of youth in multi-stakeholder dialogues, as well as intergenerational dialogues. There are barriers to youth participation such as lack of continuous research funding in the water sector and lack of support from educational institutions.

This point brings us full circle back to the Academy at Wuhan University where the Emerging Scholars Initiative is integrated into the programme of the academy with full backing by the Director Professor Wouters who has a deep commitment to educating the next generation of water lawyers.    

Speakers:

Alice Aureli, PhD, Chief of the UNESCO Section on Groundwater and Sustainability and Water Cooperation

Patricia Wouters, PhD, Director of the International Water Law Academy, Wuhan University

Gabriel Eckstein, Professor of Law and Director of the Energy, Environmental, and Natural Resource Systems Law Program, Texas and A&M University, School of Law

Luke Cole, PhD, Associate Director, Santa Cruz River Program

Yumiko Yasuda, PhD, Senior Network and Transboundary Water Cooperation Specialist, Global Water Partnership

Yelysaveta Demydenko, Learning Assistant, Knowledge Management and Transboundary Cooperation, Global Water Partnership