The Water and Climate Coalition will seek to generate dialogue, debate and ultimately consensus on a range of policy principles relating to water and climate change.
The Danish Dialogues on Integrated Land and Water Resources Management for Climate Change Adaptation represented a helpful step in identifying five principles for good adaptation and intended to directly influence discussions on this topic at COP15.
These principles have proven invaluable for policy-makers, and have been especially useful in the context of the climate change negotiations as the principles are easily understood by government representatives who are not issue experts.
Yet it is clear that policy principles relating to water are lacking in many climate-relevant areas, and for the outcomes of the climate change negotiations to be sustainable it is important for certain issues to be highlighted further. Crucially, it is necessary for water considerations to extend beyond the current focus on adaptation, and also consider how mitigation actions interact with water management, especially in the case of energy production.
To this end, the WCC will co-ordinate a global multi-stakeholder dialogue on water and energy ahead of the COP16 in 2010:
Global Water and Energy Dialogue
Water management, and energy production and usage, are deeply interrelated. The impact that climate change will have on both of these areas raises a number of complex issues. Water is the primary medium through which climate change impacts will be felt by human populations and the environment, whilst energy production is one of the most significant drivers of climate change due to the emission of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels. It is of vital importance that the water and energy nexus is included within any intergovernmental agreement that tackles climate change, as any carbon reduction agreement will mean a move towards greater efficiency standards and renewable technologies, which in turn will have impacts on the use of water.
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