Hot Tubbing in Belém: From Buzz to Breakthrough with the Baku Water Dialogue Negotiations
Climate adaptation and resilience were far more visible and present at COP30, but most of the awareness and discussion was not in the negotiation chambers. These terms were most present in the sessions and presentations and events that occur in the “pavilions,” which is what most people at COP think of (mistakenly) as the actual main event. Pavilion events may include climate negotiators, funders, or donors, but these groups are normally in the minority (and more often than not, negotiators or climate finance representatives are not present at all in the pavilions — they are mostly in the negotiation space, doing the actual “work” at COP: talking with each other about the specific language and issues on a formal agenda). Yes, I heard lots of adaptation noise. But that noise does not necessarily reflect a shift in climate policy at national or global levels in any meaningful sense. It’s buzz, not a breakthrough. Even if the buzz is louder than it’s ever been.
I’ve been attending COPs with few breaks since 2009. Adaptation and resilience issues — water, biodiversity, cities, livelihoods, indigenous people, agriculture — have slowly grown in importance (and buzz) over that time. If I had to put numbers on it, I’d say 1 or 2 percent in 2009 (Copenhagen). At Paris in 2015, we may have hit 5 percent. Glasgow in 2021? Probably 15 or 20 percent. Belém was a major break. I was just there for the first week, but I’d have to estimate 30 or 40 percent. The adjustment was enough that I actually heard climate mitigation advocates trying to argue for their work as resilience — an odd sort of “me, too!”
We also moved beyond buzz. Indeed, for COP30 freshwater was a formal part of the negotiations agenda. The last COP host, Azerbaijan, proposed last year what has been called the Baku Water Dialogue (BWD). The proposal reflects a very serious idea arising from an important insight: as adaptation and resilience rise in importance, the need to ensure quality and efficacy have also risen. While water has traditionally been viewed as a hazard, many parties now also see that water is an important cross-sectoral connector and resilience solution “integrator.” These are not discussions of water as a “sector” by itself. The BWD would create a formal mechanism to ensure that negotiators do not have to restart every COP about the linkages between water and climate adaptation and resilience. In effect, a standing process (i.e., the dialog) would keep the conversation going between COPs so that we can gather and share lessons, enshrine collective learning, and accelerate progress as the COP overall shifts more towards adaptation and resilience. This insight is not buzz. It’s breakthrough.
The Baku Water Dialogue event occurred on the evening of 11 November at COP, an event that was not livestreamed and which ran over by almost an hour. I missed a formal dinner that evening because of the BWD, but I passed on my invitation and made a new friend in the process. And I sat with some close colleagues.
The meeting was held in a large rectangular room, windowless and tall. We sat UN style around a table tracing the outline of the room. I’d say 150 people were there, including those who sat in rows of chairs behind the table. We did not have name badges (a point of consternation with the organizers). Perhaps half of the room was made of negotiators, the rest composed of civilians like myself. I was pleased to see many old friends and colleagues in the room. Perhaps even better was seeing so many people I didn’t know.
The length of the event is largely explained by the enthusiasm of the national parties (i.e., governments) in their attendance. Indeed, other than two river basin organizations (RBOs) who each had 1 minute to intervene at the very end, only parties were allowed to intervene following the introductory remarks. The Azeri moderator — brave, patient, kind woman!— had great difficulty regulating interventions, even with a timer, and a few really droned on. I would say that at least some 15 or 16 countries made supporting comments, ranging from DRC to Turkey and the Netherlands. Most were already signatories to support a formal BWD process, but some were not, such as France, and these latter countries were expressing interest and intent to support the process. A few countries also expressed caveats and concerns. Turkey for instance, stated that any discussion of water and climate avoid any mention of transboundary sharing. My sense from reading the room was that this particular intervention was not well received.
The UN Environment Program (UNEP) gave a very general prerecorded pitch for leading the BWD from TVs in the open space in the center of the room. I couldn’t see a lot to object to (or endorse). I haven’t seen UNEP very involved in these discussions to date or understand why them (or why now). The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) proposed their HydroSOS approach/tool as a framework for organizing water and climate activities at the national level. I personally know little about the tool or who has used it (and to what end); my first impressions are that it helps with early warning systems for hydrological hazards and DRR more broadly. The WMO has had some excellent staff over the years who have been in substantive negotiations; their touchpoints in governments tend to be hydromet services. There are also other tools and frameworks that may be useful such as the Water Resilience Tracker, which works with many different ministries and at subnational scales, viewing water through a thematic resilience lens. The World Bank’s Country Climate and Development Reports (CCDRs) often have a strong thematic approach too and are often embedded within ministry strategies; they are a little mixed on how they view water, but some are quite strong. The BWD may do well to take a more broad spectrum approach endorsing proven approaches and encouraging the development of new ones — innovation seems important.
Will the BWD succeed? My personal sense is that the organizers, the prominent speakers, and most if not all of the parties who intervened actually have very little awareness of what has been happening between the COPs already on these issues. They also seem to have a very limited sense of already well developed approaches and tools to support technical and policy components that have been collecting lessons and insights. There was little sense of institutional memory in the room at all.
On a personal level, the lack of context concerned me and ignorance may be dangerous. There was no sense of the history of water in the UNFCCC, of work by the UNFCCC in 2018 to institutionalize water-centric adaptation through regional workshops with >100 countries and national adaptation focal points, the leadership of Ingrid Timboe as the first water advisor to a COP presidency (yay, Ingrid in Dubai!). There was a single passing mention of the Dubai launch of the Freshwater Challenge. I also heard no sense of awareness of several failed or wayward initiatives, like Egypt's proposal on water for the Sharm COP or Morocco’s failed proposal in 2016. The latter may be very instructive. Morocco actually held a major summit in early July of 2016 in Rabat focused on water and climate, with more than two dozen African ministers (not just climate negotiators) present. I sat in the audience next to one of the senior leads for the US Army Corps of Engineers. On stage, I sat next to one of the senior economists in the South African government. Morocco had more countries invested in 2016 than the BWD has obtained so far. Why did these previous efforts not gain traction? We need to know what worked and what hasn't. Were these efforts too early? Did they have faults of design? Did they have issues around funding or implementation?
In Belém, many of the parties who addressed the BWD made passionate interventions. For the most part, we heard a lot of flood and drought stories and statements about why water connects everything. A few speakers conflated “water and climate” with WASH or, slightly more generally, SDG6. I did not understand a few statements about how “water” will “fix” the UNFCCC and climate policy and finance problems. I personally was infuriated by calls to “stop” floods and droughts, which I do not even understand as a statement. Such comments reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of climate impacts and climate science. I am aware of no initiatives in the history of the UNFCCC (or other UN conventions) that would “stop” floods and droughts, much less stop them from getting worse. We are committed to a lot of additional climate change. Just keeping pace or anticipating that change seems like a more realistic and useful approach.
I also heard no practical recommendations for how the BWD might function, realistic areas of focus and modalities for action, or funding and finance options.
I stayed until the bitter end of the session, but other than the two RBOs (also broadly supportive), no non-state actors were allowed to intervene. At best, I might have been given 60 or 90 seconds. Following some brainstorming with Ingrid by whatsapp during the session, if I had been able to intervene, I would probably have said something like:
We have fully vertically integrated tools like the Water Resilience Tracker that already link global, national (NDCs, NAPs), and subnational processes and projects, including climate finance and capacity building. The WRT has been running for over four years as a demand driven process for a total of 15 countries, with several dozen on the waiting list. It seems crazy to not work with successful existing programs.
Capacity building and showcasing excellence around water and climate are both powerful forms of soft diplomacy. The UNFCCC picked AGWA in 2018 to co-deliver adaptation training to the national adaptation focal points from more than 100 countries – an implicit message that we do know things, and we can enable transformational change for the future. I have to think that “bold policy statements” will be drafted by people who know little about adaptation and ignored by people who know little about policy. The audience for these key statements are not really water people – they are operational managers in energy, health, agriculture, and transport. These are the people who implement the priorities and projects in NDCs and NAPs, who complete the forms for financing with the Asian Development Bank or the GCF.
A lot of the water in the world is influenced by the private sector. Where are they in this process? To make this work meaningful, we may need to think of the BWD as the Water for Resilient Prosperity Dialogue. How do we keep jobs, sectors, and regions economically secure in spite of water and climate change? How can we target investment from all sources? Leaving businesses out of this discussion risks making poor countries even poorer. I would argue we are more mature now in climate policy; negotiators normally come from foreign ministries, not finance ministries – much less irrigation ministries (or farms!). A dialog that does not include these other groups risks being empty talk.
In contravention to Turkey’s statement against transboundary water statements, could we talk about transboundary adaptation and resilience through the BWD? For regions such as the West Bank and Jordan, such a framing may have an important role in peace building.
Many non-state actors have been working for years to maintain global policy strategy and engagement around water and climate issues; AGWA is one, but SIWI, GWP, the French Water Partnership, and others have been keeping momentum going and trying to gather and bind lessons into useful and actionable form. The first water and climate event I am aware of at COP was in 2010 in Cancun, co-led by the World Bank and AGWA. Parties should more be involved in these non-state processes too, and should consider building on programs that have worked, including considering hosting or co-hosting or leveraging them as vehicles for the future. We have good lists of contacts. And we have a sense of memory of what has and hasn’t worked.
A lot has already been happening, including failures, in the COP process. The Climate Champions are not really moving the needle anymore on water issues, though up through Glasgow they were very effective. Do we need a water champion?
The link between water and adaptation and resilience seems well understood by this group, but we also need to talk about water’s relationship with mitigation as well. The integrative role on climate policy of water is important.
Several UN agencies (i.e., UNESCO) have processes and tools that could also be leveraged. The finance community — especially groups such as central banks, MDBs, and issuers of sovereign debt — also need to be involved. Water is a strategic economic asset for resilience. Can water resilience become a G20 program?
The current commitment for the BWD goes through 2030 but the COP itself is looking at longer timescales — like 2050. It’s hard to imagine that water will lose its relevance or utility in five years, and the transformative power of water is probably most useful at these longer timescales.
The Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) has issued a set of indicators for countries; many of these touch on or relate to water issues. The BWD could easily do some spearheading work to demonstrate how water-centric adaptation indicators can result in effective and additional finance, limit climate risk, and and demonstrate proof of concept. Ideally, we should be able to show why a water-centric approach to adaptation and resilience results in different, better decisions than non-water-centric approaches. I don’t see why a report on these lines could not be in place before COP31.
Lastly, water is far more than lakes and rivers. Water is a cycle, and that cycle is dynamic and difficult to predict — from precipitation patterns to groundwater recharge. The “water” in the BWD should reflect such a broader vision, especially given how that dynamic nature is what binds sectors from health and agriculture to energy and forestry. If we get the water wrong, we risk unbinding institutions and undoing the important development gains of the past few decades. Water-resilient development should be a core value, one designed to bring wealth and prosperity to us through coherence despite climate change.
Those points might be a little too much for a minute or so. But at least we do not have a shortage of ideas or well defined needs
I am grateful these issues are moving. We stand ready to help and support. But success is not guaranteed, and credibility seems important.