World Water Week 2016: New study builds bridges between climate and water diplomacy

Climate change will significantly impact water flows, including in geopolitically unstable regions. With a new paper and a side event in Stockholm, adelphi sheds light on how the international community can best combine climate policy instruments with water diplomacy to tackle resulting challenges.

Climate change impacts are likely to be felt primarily through the water cycle, reinforcing the already worrying trends surrounding water scarcity, salinisation, alteration of seasonal flow patterns, and flood risks. All of these effects could potentially aggravate conflict and instability, especially in transboundary river basins. This raises important questions for foreign policy: What consequences will climate change have on water flows in contested international basins? How could climate adaptation help mitigate social and political tensions? And how can water and climate diplomacy tools be used to strengthen adaptive capacities?

Water and Climate Diplomacy: Integrative Approaches for Adaptive Action in Transboundary River Basins, a new study by adelphi supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, analyses existing instruments and their potential for creating synergies between climate policy and transboundary water governance. It will be presented at a side event and discussed by a high-ranking panel in Stockholm:

Side Event: Integrating climate governance and water diplomacy

Tuesday, 30 August 2016

09:00-10:30 am CET

NL Music Hall / Musiksalen

Find out more about the side event and its speakers

Convened by the German Federal Foreign Office, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), and adelphi, the side event will focus on pragmatic steps towards enhancing resilience and cooperation. These measures include instruments and methods that foreign policymakers could employ to build on the success of COP21 while simultaneously strengthening peace and regional integration. The audience is invited to take part in a discussion on how and where these different instruments might relate to and build on existing regional cooperation mechanisms. A special focus will be placed on managing shared risks in the Nile basin, drawing on the experience of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI).

The World Water Week has been the leading annual global event for addressing the world's most pressing water-related issues for more than 25 years. The conference is hosted and organised by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) and takes place in Stockholm from 28 August to 2 September 2016. This year, the overarching theme of the conference is "Water for Sustainable Growth".

Learn more about adelphi’s projects in the fields of “Water” and “Water Cooperations”.