Experts and leaders in water and climate have defended on Tuesday in Sharm el Sheikh (Egypt), where the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) is being held, the importance of improving water management and governance to curb the effects of climate change and demanded the international community «to take water seriously».
«There is no time to waste. Now is the time to take water seriously as an imperative for climate action,» water and climate experts and leaders have called for in a joint statement on the sidelines of the Summit.
In their statement, they urge countries to ensure that the COP27 negotiating outcome document recognizes the important contribution that water can make to climate mitigation and adaptation and to emphasize these issues as well as the importance of protecting, conserving and restoring water and water-related ecosystems.
In this regard, they urge governments to establish effective policies, knowledge and tools to manage water for multiple objectives in a rapidly changing climate. Currently, 60 percent of the member states of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reveal a decline in their capacities in hydrological monitoring and, therefore, in providing decision support at the water, food and energy nexus.
In fact, more than 50 percent of the world’s countries do not have a quality management system for their water-related data. Only about 40 percent of countries worldwide have good flood and drought early warning systems in place.
On the other hand, they call on heads of state and government to urgently take more integrated action on water and climate to replace the existing fragmented approach in which water is often seen as a problem as «part of the solution» to achieving the Paris Agreement goals.
The event, hosted by the World Meteorological Organization, concludes that better water resources management would have «multiple benefits,» including reducing water-related disasters, strengthening climate adaptation and resilience, and helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The statement insists that the challenge is «urgent» because the impacts of climate change are often felt through water. In a statement, they point out that as the atmosphere exceeds one degree of warming above pre-industrial levels, sea levels rise and the cryosphere melts, the effects of climate change are being felt as never before.
Thus, it adds that the resulting floods, heat waves, droughts, storms and sea level rise around the world will get progressively worse as warming continues toward 1.5 degrees and beyond.
The communiqué was issued just before the high-level roundtable on Water Security during the Leaders’ Summit at COP27, as the Egyptian Presidency has set water as one of the priorities in the summit negotiations.
WMO recalls that currently 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water at least one month a year and this figure is expected to increase to more than 5 billion by 2050. Thus, UN-Water estimates that between 2002 and 2018 74 percent of all natural disasters were water-related, either in the form of droughts or floods.
Therefore, water-related hazards are an important part of the new initiative to achieve Early Warnings for All in the next five years, launched on Monday by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
The Water and Climate Leaders group is a group of 18 high-level policy decision makers that provides strategic guidance on integrating the water and climate agendas and leads an international coalition led by WMO and nine UN agencies, the Global Water Partnership.
One of its members is Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon, who has pointed out that more than 1,000 of the country’s 14,000 glaciers have melted completely and that the total volume of Tajikistan’s glaciers, which constitute more than 60 percent of the Central Asian region’s water resources, has shrunk by almost a third.
For his part, Egypt’s Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation, Hani Sewilam, has outlined how the country is facing water stress in a country where the Nile River is a lifeblood and warned how Africa is particularly vulnerable to water-related hazards and shortages.
The panel also includes the former president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, former prime ministers of the Republic of Togo and the Republic of Korea, as well as high-level representatives from UN entities, civil society, the private sector, and a youth envoy.
The group has outlined the benefits that better management of water resources would provide such as reducing the risk of climate-induced disasters; better management of wetlands, dams and other water reservoirs, with appropriate safeguards, provides options for precautionary measures and emergency responses when such events occur; reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
«We urge you to prioritize early warning systems for floods, droughts and other water-related hazards, as well as optimize water storages* in your disaster risk reduction strategies,» the statement said.
They further note that improving resilience and security in the face of climate change would contribute to improved human rights and livelihoods, economic development, poverty reduction, job creation, public health, gender equality and the maintenance of biodiversity.
«We call on them to take into account the current and future availability of freshwater, in the context of increasing demand, when allocating water to different sectors and meeting their social and environmental priorities and their climate change mitigation and adaptation measures,» the leaders said.
