UN Watercourses Convention enters into force
UN Watercourses Convention enters into force
Following key principles of international law, a new tool to improve transboundary water cooperation world-wide will strengthen cooperation and prevent potential conflicts over shared water resources.
Transboundary waters – physically shared between two or more countries – are some of the most important and vulnerable freshwater resources on the planet. Although transboundary water cooperation raises major practical and political issues, states have a responsibility to work together to manage them in a sustainable and integrated manner. © ICPDR/Mandl
This year, the ICP DR is celebrating its 20th anniversary and the 1994 signing of the Danube River Protection Convention. However, other basins are less advanced: with 60% of the trans-boundary river basins in the world lacking any international cooperation mechanism, improvements in waterway governance are urgently needed. Last August may have seen a turning point for the UN Watercourses Convention (UN WC).
Seventeen years since its adoption in 1997, this August the UNWC finally entered into force. The UNWC constitutes a global legal mechanism for facilitating the equitable and sustainable management of transboundary rivers and lakes around the world. The Convention’s principal objective is to strengthen cooperation between states over their shared water resources following key principles of international law and prevent potential conflicts.
With the required number of contracting parties ratifying the convention, there is now a new tool to improve transboundary water cooperation world-wide. This step follows the ‘opening up’ of the UNECE Water Convention last year to include countries from outside the UNECE region.
Taken together, experts see the two conventions as entry points into a new era in transboundary river basin management especially for parts of the world where there are currently no appropriate water management mechanisms in place.
A new element for multi-level water governance. “Global and regional framework conventions operate as integral components of the legal governance of shared freshwater, laying out basic standards that ensure some coherence across the entire international legal system, while supplementing and reinforcing basin-specific agreements,” explains WWF water law expert Flavia Rocha Loures in a comment published in the summer issue of Stockholm Water Front (#3/2014). “In this context, the UNWC offers a clear, stable, global framework for cooperation and is thus a crucial element of the multi-level legal governance of transboundary waters.”
In line with coordination between the UNWC and other established legal instruments, Rocha Loures also emphasises the UNECE Water Convention – as well as the need to develop institutional structures to support the implementation of the UNWC. This is also where regional organisations such as the ICPDR fit in: advanced river basins offer learning opportunities for basins that are now developing water management mechanisms. The ICPDR has traditionally close ties with the UNECE Water Convention and considers it its ‘mother convention’.
The ICPDR receives more than a dozen study visits by water management bodies and academics every year and the ICPDR is frequently showcased in international conferences. This reflects the recognition of the ICPDR as one of the most developed transboundary basin organisations in the world. UNWC is highly welcome as a tool to formalise good practices in water management and the ICPDR will continue to promote and support such valuable tools globally, offering inspiration and lessons learnt from the Danube experience.
Learn more about the UN Watercourses Convention at www.unwatercoursesconvention.org.
