How can water support the SDGs: Sector, Connector, Resilience
Brief remarks, delivered by John Matthews to a UN DESA workshop for the 2023 SDG Summit, with reference to how the March 2023 UN Water Conference can support and synergize with the SDGs.
Good morning! Next March, for the first time since 1977, the UN will focus on water at a major conference. We are so grateful to the Netherlands and Tajikistan in creating this opportunity. Globally, we need this conference, and we need it to be successful. A huge amount has happened around water and economic development policy and practice over the past 45 years. Not all of this thinking is represented, however, in the SDGs overall, much less in SDG 6.
The SDGs largely frame water as a distinct sector. Water _is_ a sector — it’s pipes and pumps, boreholes and wells, how we treat and deliver water to households and businesses, how we store and move water. This is the water we can see, that we drink. Quite rightly, SDG 6 was intended to address issues around basic water access and sanitation issues (WASH), such as in rural areas and the water-deserts of many cities and urban settlements, especially informal and peri-urban areas. Those remain clear, pressing needs. That’s almost all of the focus for SDG 6, at least in its original formulation. It’s certainly where the energy for SDG 6 is if we look at civil society and most UN SDG 6 programs.
In many cases, this WASH community is distinct and separate from the larger water community. WASH really comes from the public health movement, not from the technical water managers who manage water resources through the lens of economics, engineering, law and governance, and hydrology. That’s a gap in the full water community, and SDG 6 has over time made some strides to try to knit these two groups together.
The UN Water meeting next March is another big step in this joining process. Moreover, this meeting is looking at what I have been calling for the past decade “water as a connector” rather than “water as a sector.” Some examples:
Most of our energy is closely tied to its embedded water — nuclear, solar, hydro, coal — indeed, almost everything except for wind power.
Water is integral to the food system, going far beyond irrigation to include food processing, transport, and preparation.
Clean water has become especially clear to topics such as global pandemics, as has been well demonstrated by covid and all of our good hand washing.
Disaster risk reduction work, especially for tropical cyclones, droughts, and flooding, are the very language of water.
The role of water in intra- and inter-state conflict and peacemaking is quite clear, to the point that many members of the military and intelligence communities are closely tracking water conditions in places like Syria, groundwater in South Asia, and international trade in relationships between East Asia and Africa.
Ecosystems are in most cases the source and vehicle of transmission and movement of water across the landscape, second only to the climate.
Perhaps the newest set of connections are with both climate mitigation and climate adaptation. The long-term sustainability of most of our new clean energy investments are intertwined with sustainable water management and water sharing — with the Kariba and Hoover Dams clear evidence of what happens when we get these things wrong.
And as the IPCC has stated in AR6 last February, because most of the impacts of climate change are felt through the water cycle, we need a revolution in our adaptation and resilience programs towards what they call water-based adaptation.
The opportunity for the SDGs in the UN Water meeting is not from having water recognized as a dominant force. That’s not my message. The opportunity is for water to become the rhythm section of the SDG band — the enabler, the tool for coherence and sharing, the currency for negotiation and making tradeoffs and setting priorities. This is water as a systemic solution for many if not most of the SDGs. The question for the water community is, How can you help all of the SDGs?
A secondary challenge is SDG 6 in particular. Water supply, sanitation and hygiene issues remain a critical priority, and I also do not mean to question the integrity of SDG 6 as it was originally framed. But WASH issues should not be held in isolation or as separate from the emerging and extensive body of resilient water resources management that can serve and help deliver SDG 6 with the other SDGs.
Some specific suggestions for how to link the SDG conference with the UN Water conference:
First, ask UN Water to facilitate the water gaps within each of the SDGs. Where can we see limitations? Where is water hidden? Are the key actors for each of the SDGs effectively water managers? My sense is that, in most cases, we are all passive water managers who need to see our implicit and explicit water decisions.
Second, ask the water community at UN Water to help see the connections between the SDGs. For instance, many of the same basins where we are seeing intensive energy development are also the basins where we have intensive irrigation and urban water needs. How do we make sure that the SDGs are not actually seeding conflict between sectors, ministries, and countries? That the SDGs are fighting each other or will fail just as we near meeting each goal? The water community can help us see these connections, to negotiate the rules for sharing and communicating.
Third and lastly, how can UN Water secure the gains of the SDGs? Water investments are long-lived investments — water infrastructure for energy, health, irrigation, transport, and water supply will reorient our societies, cities, and ecosystems for decades, perhaps many centuries. They lock in choices and options and reorganize other systems. Water infrastructure simply lasts a long time, and our designs are imperfect. Which means that water infrastructure is deeply exposed to climate impacts that may be uncertain and hard to predict for technical decision makers, like planners, engineers, and investors. Thus, I suggest that we ask UN Water a critical question: how can we secure the goals of 2030 so that they survive the climate impacts and economic transformations we will see from 2031 and beyond? In effect, the water community may be key to how we ensure that the Sustainable Development Goals become our Resilient Development Goals.
Thank you for your time and attention!