Extreme weather events such as droughts and floods are expected to become more severe under future climate conditions. This implies a concern for policymakers in national and international security.
On the 15th of December 2020, the High-level Panel on Green Alliance underlined the commitment of Caribbean states and the European Union (EU) to ambitious global climate action. Co-hosted by the German Federal Foreign Office and the European Commission, it demonstrated that action on climate change mitigation and resilience to climate-fragility risks will be core pillars for the future partnership between the two regions.
Raging fires, expanding mineral extraction and land clearing for agribusiness are not only destroying Amazonian lands and biodiversity, they are also eradicating fundamental knowledge on land stewardship. Climate diplomacy has a key role to play in protecting archaeological sites that preserve lessons from the past that could help the Amazon recover in the future.
Water is a critical resource everywhere, but in the Middle East, it is a defining issue. Changing demographics, poor management and climate change are pummelling the region’s already alarming water security situation. EcoPeace Middle East’s brand new report ‘A Green Blue Deal for the Middle East’ taps into water as a make-or-break issue for regional cooperation, economic development, and even for the future of peace negotiations.
This report seeks to inform Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian policy makers, and the understanding of international stakeholders, as they work to meet climate-related challenges in the Middle East. The authors’ assessment is that a deal that gives emphasis to the importance of water issues in the region is a feasible and effective policy approach to an urgent challenge, and one that can serve to address conflict drivers, advance a two state solution and promote trust-building and cooperation in a conflict-mired region.
Water and climate change are intricately linked. Global warming is changing the water cycle, affecting water availability and quality and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. At the same time, sustainable water management and energy-efficient wastewater treatment play an important role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. This state-of-the-art report encapsulates the main impacts of climate change on the water cycle and highly water-dependent sectors.
Though focused on climate change, National Adaptation Plans offer important assessments of the risks a country faces and can be valuable in devising comprehensive pandemic response strategies.
As part of this year’s online World Water Week at Home, adelphi and IHE Delft convened the workshop "Water diplomacy: a tool for climate action?". The workshop reflected on the role that foreign policy can play in mitigating, solving and potentially preventing conflicts over the management of transboundary water resources, especially in a changing climate.
The longstanding dispute over water rights among Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia escalated in 2011 when Ethiopia began construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), in the absence of any agreement with downstream Egypt. The GERD dispute offers an alarming insight into just how dangerous future transboundary water disputes may become, particularly in the context of a changing climate.
World Water Week 2020 was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To help bridge the gap between the 2019 and 2021 World Water Weeks, the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) organised 'WWWeek At Home' between 24 and 28 August 2020.
In this SIWI World Water Week workshop organised by adelphi and IHE Delft, experts from the diplomacy, development, security, climate change and water communities discussed the conditions under which specific diplomatic tools can be used by riparian and non-riparian countries to shape regional cooperation to address climate, and other security and development challenges, such as migration.
Few places have suffered more from the COVID-19 pandemic than southern China, the region where the novel coronavirus was first detected in the city of Wuhan. But it turned out that the pandemic is not the only calamity to befall south China this year. The region has been inundated by heavy rainfall since late May, creating a risk of catastrophic flooding.
Conflicts connected to water-security are often related to climate change issues. However, the link between water-scarcity-related risks and security challenges is not as straightforward, direct and immediate as often perceived. The online workshop ‘Mobilising decision-makers on water scarcity-induced conflict risks: The Water, Peace and Security Partnership’, organised by the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO) and adelphi, looked into this complex relationship.