New Water Economics for Climate Action throughout the Rio Conventions, towards UN 2026 valuing the hydrological cycle as a global common good.
The hydrological cycle and its linkages with climate change – origin, impact and actions – are center stage in this session. Bridging the three Rio Convention COPs in 2024 – Cali, Baku and Riyad – with the UN 2026 Water Conference.
Decades of collective mismanagement and undervaluation of water around the world have damaged our freshwater and land ecosystems and allowed for the continuing contamination of water resources. We can no longer count on freshwater availability for our collective future.
Our policies, and the science and economics that underpin them, have also overlooked a critical freshwater resource, the “green water” in our soils and plant life, which circulates through the atmosphere and generates around half the rainfall we receive on land.
Most gravely, while itself a victim of climate change, the degradation of freshwater ecosystems including the loss of moisture in the soil has become a driver of climate change and biodiversity loss. The result is more frequent and increasingly severe droughts, floods, heatwaves, and wildfires, playing out across the globe. Nearly 3 billion people and more than half of the world’s food production are now in areas where total water storage is projected to decline.
We need bolder and more integrated thinking and a recasting of policy frameworks to address these challenges. The Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW) calls for a new economics of water. Recognizing the hydrological cycle as a global common good, understanding that it connects countries and regions through both the water that we see and atmospheric moisture flows; that it is deeply interconnected with climate change and the loss of biodiversity with each rebounding on the other; and that it impacts on all the SDGs.
The session will explore the needed actions, with a focus on Just Water Partnerships and global water governance needs, in the context of the three Rio Conventions, building a bridge from Cali, to Baku, to Riyad and beyond towards the UN 2026 Water Conference.
