‘The Opportunity Is Now’: Water Advocates View Upcoming UN Climate Conference as Moment of Relevance

When they converge on Glasgow this fall to rekindle pivotal global climate negotiations that were dampened during the pandemic, diplomats and government ministers will confront a world much changed since their last convention.
 
Events of the past year — torrential floods, exhausting droughts, deadly heat waves — sharpened focus that society must adapt to these climate changes. This recognition is pushing adaptation up the agenda in the weeks preceding the Glasgow meeting, which runs from October 31 to November 12. Some have taken to calling the UN’s 26th climate convention the “adaptation convention.”
 
Water advocates view the attention to adaptation as an opportunity. Water has been relatively neglected in past UN climate conventions, even though the consequences of climate change will largely be felt through deficits and surpluses of water.

Dam Battles Converge on Cambodia’s 3S Rivers

For decades, Nov Lun and his fellow fishermen harvested the rich bounty of the Sesan River in northeastern Cambodia. Then, three years ago, a giant hydroelectric power plant opened upstream from his village of Kumpun. Irregular water releases from the dam began regularly entangling his nets and dislocating his fishing boat. Fish started disappearing, and soon most of his livelihood had washed away. “The river has changed a lot,” says the 70-year-old Lun.

His story is not unique. In fact, others have fared even worse since the construction of the Lower Sesan 2 Dam, which is located near the confluence of the Sesan and Srepok rivers, large tributaries to the Mekong River. According to a Human Rights Watch report released last month, the dam has resulted in the displacement of nearly 5,000 inhabitants, mostly Indigenous people and other ethnic minorities who had lived in villages along the two rivers for generations. According to the report, people who were moved to make way for the dam were coerced into accepting inadequate compensation, provided with poor housing and few services at resettlement sites, and given no training in other ways to earn a living.

A frequent contributor to National Geographic, Stefan Lovgren often writes about freshwater conservation issues. He covers the Mekong River as part of the USAID project “Wonders of the Mekong”. Follow him on Instagram @mekongwonders or visit his website

HotSpots H2O: ‘Global Indigenous Agenda’ Calls for Water, Land, and Resource Governance at 2021 IUCN World Congress

Indigenous activists and organizations from around the world met virtually this week for the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Zoom-based World Conservation Congress, an event that gathers world leaders once every four years to discuss the global challenge of sustainability, environmental leadership, and nature conservation.

Indigenous delegates appeared for the first time as their own constituency, after negotiating for this representation at the previous Congress, in 2016. They led the first ever World Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nature, a new addition to the IUCN program. This summit featured Indigenous speakers from Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the United States, Costa Rica, Norway, Peru, Burkina Faso, New Zealand, Kenya, Switzerland, France, and Greenland, who comprehensively addressed the ecological issues facing 470 million Indigenous people worldwide.

What’s Up With Water – September 13, 2021

Featured coverage from this week's episode of What's Up With Water looks at: 

• In the United Kingdom, regulators have temporarily given water utilities permission to treat wastewater to a lower standard.
• In India, a government program is bringing running water to more homes in areas of high-poverty.
• In an unprecedented joint statement, over 200 medical journals have warned that the largest threat to global public health is climate change.

5 Things You Need To Know About Water And Climate

This article originally appeared on the World Economic Forum’s website.

In the Global Risks Report 2016, which draws attention to ways that global risks could evolve and interact in the next decade, water crises features highly. Here are five reasons why.

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