“Without water there is no future.” Pedro Arrojo-Aguodo, Special Rapporteur on the rights to water and sanitation, delivered this reminder as UN-Water Members and Partners met for the first time since the UN 2023 Water Conference, with implementation of its key outcomes as a high priority agenda item. Throughout the day, participants considered current and future actions under the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 Global Acceleration Framework, before embarking on deeper discussions on the follow-up to the UN 2023 Water Conference in World Café-style small groups.
Opening the meeting, UN-Water Chair Gilbert Houngbo highlighted that participants would do a “deep dive” into the recommendations and outcomes from the UN 2023 Water Conference, calling attention to upcoming discussions on the importance of mainstreaming intergovernmental processes and ensuring that a UN system-wide strategy would build on the SDG 6 Global Acceleration Framework.
Eva Lövgren, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) Deputy Director of International Organizations and Policy Support, welcomed participants to SIDA headquarters and underlined the importance of ensuring and sustaining water security for achieving the SDGs. She called attention to the need for improved water stewardship across water-intensive sectors, including agriculture, manufacturing and mining, and stressed the importance of equitable and participatory decision-making approaches for ensuring healthy freshwater ecosystems.
As UN-Water Members and Partners dove into the Meeting Agenda, participants heard reports and discussed progress and ways forward for achieving the SGD 6 Global Acceleration Framework, including as they relate to the following initiatives:
- SDG Capacity Development Initiative;
- Task Force on Country Level Engagement;
- Expert Group on Regional Level Coordination;
- Integrated Monitoring Initiative for SDG 6; and
- Roadmap on human rights to water and sanitation.
During the afternoon, UN-Water Members and Partners participated in a World Café-style discussion of four issues related to follow-up on the UN 2023 Water Conference.
One issue considered follow-up to the Water Action Agenda, which comprises 832 voluntary commitments submitted for the UN 2023 Water Conference. They discussed ways for grouping and analyzing the initiatives to better understand the Water Action Agenda’s contributions to SDG 6 implementation. Participants also discussed additional information that should be collected about the initiatives to better understand the Water Action Agenda’s scope, with the goal of establishing a baseline from which progress can be measured.
A second issue related to the development of a UN system-wide strategy for water and sanitation, including questions such as: what would the main value of a UN system-wide strategy or action plan be? Who would use it and who is the target audience? How would it be produced? And would a strategy or plan support greater coherence, implementation, resources and accountability?
A third issue focused on the issue of mainstreaming water and how UN-Water could accelerate action on recommendations from the UN 2023 Water Conference to:
- promote convergence of intergovernmental processes and agendas and strengthen integrated policy making;
- promote better water governance and apply and develop mechanisms for cross-sectoral coordination; and
- carry out an “Inter-COP process” to connect, integrate and fully implement water-related decisions made at global assemblies, conventions, and frameworks dedicated to climate, resilience, and the environment.
A fourth and final issue addressed what other actions need to be undertaken, and which additional actors need to be involved in the follow-up to the UN 2023 Water Conference. Participants were reminded that actors focused on climate mitigation and food systems were largely missing from the Conference.
UN-Water participants will share summaries of each of the World Café discussions on Saturday morning, 19 August.
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All ENB photos are free to use with attribution. For the 38th Meeting of UN-Water, please use: Photo by IISD/ENB | Mika Schroder.
Plenary
Abou Amani, Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme (IHP)
Sulton Rahimzoda, Tajikistan
Aart van der Horst, the Netherlands
William Reidhead, UN-Water Global Monitoring Officer
Sonja Koeppel, Secretary, Water Convention, UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)
World Café Sessions
