Side event details

The GCEW and IWMI propose a High-Level Roundtable Side Event:

“Water should be considered as an organising principle to successfully implement sustainable development. We must adopt a “water and beyond” perspective across all agendas and domains.”

(Final Report, GCEW, p. 185)

As the Final Report of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW) has made clear, the risks posed by an increasingly “tilted” hydrological cycle require a fundamental shift in our approach to water across all agendas and domains. Specifically, they require that we center the stability of the water cycle as a collective policy priority and tailor our coordinating architecture and implementing mechanisms to meet the needs of that priority.

Making that shift begins by stepping back and taking stock. Specifically, it begins by “recasting” our existing global policy frameworks through the lens of water economics, enabling us to identify existing capacities, outstanding needs, and the structural adjustments necessary to bridge them.

This High-Level Roundtable will bring together key stakeholders working across four of those frameworks – the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar), the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Participants will survey how water cuts across those frameworks and discuss how centering water as an organizing principle would aid each in their efforts to advance their mutually reinforcing mandates.

The dialogue seeks to launch a conversation that will build through the upcoming COPs of each of the four framework conventions to the United Nations Water Conference 2026. Its purpose is to develop a pragmatic proposition for building global coordinating and implementation architecture that is fit-for-purpose as input for the 2026 UN Water Conference.

This roundtable will convene representatives from key multilateral processes and their partners for feedback on first findings and ways forward. It will seek their perspectives on collective mission, ambition, processes for implementation, spaces of challenge and opportunity, and potential roles for participating parties and partners.

The outcome of the Roundtable will be a roadmap for next steps. That roadmap will guide further research and continuing stakeholder consultation, leading to recommendations for the development of needs-tailored architecture, frameworks, and mechanisms to inform diplomatic negotiation at the 2026 UN Water Conference, and beyond.