The annual UN climate conference, which will be held in Belém, Brazil, in November, has acquired greater depth in its third decade. From an initial focus on limiting heat-trapping emissions, the two-week gathering has evolved into a raucous forum to address financing, adaptation, and other aspects related to living in an overheated world.
John Matthews, executive director of the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation, an NGO that focuses on water and climate, says the change is so pronounced that he now calls the UN conference a “carbon and water convention.”
The new direction is driven by a self-preservation instinct – “a policy revolt,” Matthews said – among the countries who formerly sat the bench as the world’s biggest carbon polluters debated the boundaries of greenhouse gas emission limits.
“The 170 countries that were not included in that carbon discussion basically revolted over the past seven or eight years,” Matthews said. “And they said, ‘You haven’t been making good progress on slowing climate change down. We need to do a lot of adaptation and resilience work.’”
Much of that work is expressed through water.
Matthews and his colleague Ingrid Timboe joined Circle of Blue’s Brett Walton to discuss these and other global trends for water and climate, including a global goal for adaptation, the impact of foreign aid cuts, and the “infectious idea” of water resilience.
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TRANSCRIPT
Brett Walton: Welcome to Speaking of Water. I’m Brett Walton, a reporter for Circle of Blue. Today we have a special double feature, not one guest, but two. I’m joined by John Matthews and Ingrid Timboe, both from the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation. John, Ingrid, thanks for joining me.
John Matthews: Thank you very much.
Ingrid Timboe: Yeah, thanks for having us.
BW: We’ll cover some big and timely topics today, things like global cooperation on water and climate and progress towards water resilience. But I want to start with something more basic, which is, what is the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation. John, can you give us a 30 second elevator pitch about what you all are, and what you do?
JM: Sure. And thanks again, Brett. AGWA, Alliance for Global Water Adaptation, is a network with a strong core leadership. We’ve been around for 15 years now. We were founded in 2010 with the World Bank, and we focus on the intersection between water and climate. And we focus on technical interventions – how we develop the state-of-the-art, best practices for how we include climate perspectives into water resources management, and how we bring water perspectives and insights into climate adaptation, resilience issues. And we also do a lot of policy work. There’s technical issues. They scale up to thinking about how all kinds of ministries and agencies, and even global conventions should try to reflect these insights.
BW: Yeah, it’s a broad arena of work with global reach. Today, I want to focus on a particular part of it, which is what I’ll call the institutional infrastructure of water. That’s a lot of syllables. So I’ll explain what I mean. I often write about the physical infrastructure of water. So the pipes and the pumps and dams and canals. But what I’m talking about here are the institutions that enable these physical things to be built and operate. So the organizations and the financial systems and the laws and policies and global agreements.
So Ingrid, I was interested in something you wrote recently about the splintering of global governance, and how the UN system and these big high-level forums are undergoing a change. So I guess, how is that affecting water? What sort of changes do you see in this global infrastructure.
IT: Yeah, thanks, Brett. And thanks for having us today. I guess to start, I would caveat this to say that our work focuses – and my work in particular – focuses primarily on the UNFCCC and global climate policy. So there’s obviously a number of conventions related to water globally. But our focus is primarily on the UNFCCC. So I’ll probably focus on that, although there’s some relevance to this in other conventions as well.
This is not something that is a sudden thing. I would say, this has been kind of a longer-term trend that we’re seeing the splintering of global governance around climate issues. It was a big deal to get to Paris in 2015. And that was kind of a really unique moment. And once we – there was still a lot of goodwill happening for the next several years in this space – but as we started to move into the implementation, the real hard work of it, of the convention, I think you start to see some of the challenges of global governance really come to the fore. And we’re seeing a lot of that happening. That’s also coincided with a lot of things not related to climate. Well, they are related, but not maybe directly related to climate change, things like the Covid pandemic and global supply chain issues. And all of these other things coinciding at the same time that are really testing the fundamentals of our global governance systems around climate change.
What that has meant for water, it’s twofold. On the one hand, water over the last five years, as countries are focusing more on implementing climate commitments, water has really been elevated because countries are really seeing how water is so essential to all aspects of their climate change, adaptation, and mitigation plans. And so that’s really helped us in terms of messaging in terms of when we go to COPs or other UN climate conventions, I don’t really need to convince anybody anymore why the water community is here. They understand it, they get it. And so, on the one hand, that’s really helped us. On the other hand, with this kind of splintering, there is also a sense of circling the wagons a little bit as well. And so in the formal negotiation space there is less space, I would say now for water than maybe a couple of years ago, and we’ll see where this is headed. We have a new incoming COP Presidency in Brazil that’s trying to kind of take a slightly different tack. Although water is not expressly a priority for Brazil, we’ll see how things go with COP 30. I think COP 30 will be a really big test for how we’re going to go forward over the next couple of years.
BW: And COP 30 being the next global UN climate meeting later this year in Brazil. We’ll get to some questions about that a bit later. But you mentioned about greater awareness, and not having to explain why water is at the table in these meetings. What do you attribute that to that, that rising awareness, any breakthrough?
IT: Well, I would like to, you know, highlight AGWA’s role.
BW: Of course.
IT: Obviously in this. But no, it’s a large global effort. I mean, there are a lot of water organizations and community folks that have been involved in raising their voices collectively and raising the profile of water. There’s been a water pavilion at these COPs now, for this will be the fourth year. And so there’s a lot of energy in the water community around climate which is excellent. I think that helps. But I really would attribute the biggest thing to what I mentioned before in that countries are having to implement their climate commitments and doing so, whether it’s changes to their agricultural systems, whether it’s promoting urban resilience, on the adaptation side or on the mitigation side, looking at their alternative energy production types, whether it be hydropower, whether it be wind, solar, requiring battery production, which has a lot of water inputs into it. They’re seeing how water is incredibly important, and also because we are facing the impacts of climate change now more frequently, seeing how there is increasing variability and uncertainty around the hydrologic cycle and how that’s affecting their ability to be able to implement those plans. So I think a combination of the work that we all have been doing, and also the actual mechanics of adapting and mitigating climate change.
BW: Yeah, adaptation is in your organization’s name, and a lot of the work you do is centered around water resilience. So I want to bring John in here and just ask you, what does water resilience mean in the context of your work?
JM: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. It’s actually one that I feel like I have multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day and I would actually say it’s a relatively new term. I’m not aware of it having been used before around 2019. So maybe.
BW: Water? water resilience? Resilience used in relation to water?
JM: Water resilience. Yeah. And even the term resilience used in the climate space, I don’t think, goes back more than a couple of years before that as a kind of broader concept, and I would also distinguish between adaptation and resilience as terms. So water resilience, why is it a useful term? I think it’s a term that in my mind it reflects many of the concepts that Ingrid was just talking about, that we can talk about water as a hazard. But what I think is more important, actually more useful, if you’re interested in solving problems, is to leverage water as a climate solution, and that it has unique qualities in terms of being able to connect sectors, connect projects, and it also presents some unique difficulties, too. Climate models are spectacularly, famously, horrifically bad about being able to predict how water in a particular place is going to change over time with additional climate change, and so we can say ‘droughts and floods.’ But it’s much more complicated than that. And honestly, most institutions don’t have the capacity to be able to figure out how to take a kind of predictive approach to water.
And so water resilience, to me, it recognizes this centrality of water as our most powerful tool for responding to climate impacts. But it also means that we need to bring some new approaches to that new tool. So I’m hoping that when people use the term, they’re not relabeling what they were doing five or 10 or 50 years ago. That actually, what they’re saying is, this is a new approach that we are going to be working on into the future.
BW: Right, to go a bit more into the details. You said that water resilience is a way to leverage water for climate solutions. What does that look like?
JM: Well, a really good example. Ingrid and I are both, and you too, I guess Brett, are all on the west coast, the Pacific coast of North America, and a really good example of a city, that is, we don’t necessarily think of it as water stressed, but it actually is, is San Francisco. It gets historically, it gets 80 percent of its water from a single reservoir up in the High Sierra around 125 miles away, which is around 180 kilometers or so. It’s quite a distance for it to come down. It’s a reservoir behind a dam called Hetch Hetchy. And almost all the water that’s in that reservoir comes from snowpack. So it’s a seasonal snowpack accumulation. San Francisco is a real thought leader in the urban water resilience space. And they said, ‘This is a threat, we have come close several times in the past 20 years of completely going dry, to our own version of Day Zero.’ And that’s terrifying, right? Like 20 percent of their water, that it’s not just for the city of San Francisco. They are actually the bulk water supplier for all the East Bay, and some of South Bay too, so they have in their mind water resilience, I think quite rightly, means they need to diversify their water sources.
They need to be able to think about water that is coming from multiple independent directions. So they also need to think about storage in a completely different way than they have in the past. And I think in that sense they’re actually kind of graduating their utility from just focusing on the city, or how that city it works with other kind of partner surrounding communities and their own utilities. To saying actually, we need to think of the water utility as a way to provision resilience itself across this region. If we don’t have reliable water supplies, then who’s going to want to invest here? Who’s going to want to keep moving here? People are going to start leaving, property values will change, the whole basis of the economy will go away. So it’s really a fundamental rethinking, I believe, about the role of water as it permeates across the whole economy and tries to think about how we manage economies with also shifting ecosystems.
BW: AGWA tracks these types of adaptations and resilience activities in its Water Resilience Tracker, right?
JM: That’s a fantastic tool that’s been running for about three and a half years with a baker’s dozen or so of countries. It’s a program that we put together that is especially supposed to start at a national level and kind of work both up to global levels and then down to subnational levels, but really focusing not on the water agencies, but really focusing on the climate planners. The people that often have relatively minor roles, often kind of crippled roles inside of governments and saying, actually, you are the people that have the insights to be able to not just reduce climate risk, but actually make sure that we can think about climate change with prosperity and wealth-building and creation for our whole economy, leveraging that same idea that San Francisco has around water.
BW: Yeah, thinking about this connection between national and international. There’s been a pullback recently from many governments in foreign aid funding. Is that having any effect on water resilience activities that you all are involved with?
JM: I would love to hear Ingrid’s answer.
IT: I think of like in the climate world they talk about different scopes of emissions. There’s scope 1, scope, 2 and scope 3. I would say, scope 1 impacts – direct impacts – not as much right now because our because our network is quite global, we are active globally. We are very grateful to our donors and partners internationally. And so it hasn’t had kind of that direct impact, at least not yet. However, because of changing budgets, particularly here in the United States and changing priorities that is impacting our donors, our friends, our government friends in other countries and in other regions. That they are also having to shift some of their priorities to make up for the those changes here in the United States. So I would say it’s indirect as of right now.
However, I do want to caveat that to say there is also a need – John’s talking about diversifying water sources – I think, in this space we also have been thinking for quite a while, also about diversifying the partners and the funders and the donors and things that we’re looking to work with, to build our own internal resilience, but also to influence those different areas, those different types of partners. So partnering more with private sector partnering, more with different types of financial institutions, and others. And so that was something we were already thinking about and working on. And so it’s in line with what we were already doing. So we’re really grateful that we can continue to do the good work that we’re doing now, while also be looking out for additional kind of new opportunities, new partners. And as John was saying, this water resilience space is really open right now. And actually, I think there is a lot of space, not just for AGWA, but for others who are working on these issues, especially around energy and water issues. I mean, it’s just massive, massive with the water needs of electricity, increasing electricity needs. Our grids are so stressed already now and thinking about everything that’s happening with AI and data centers. I mean, that’s probably a whole other podcast which you should do, but like there’s just this huge space for this conversation. And there’s a lot of people who are thinking really hard about these issues. And so I think there’s contracting space in some areas, but there’s expanding space in others. Would be my take on it. John, I don’t know if you want to add anything to that.
JM: I will start with where you just ended. Because I completely agree. I think, that what you see in the news generally especially say around aid agencies around maybe foreign investment, geopolitical tension, even geoeconomic tension. Of course, that has an impact on some of the kind of high-profile policies. But actually, I feel really optimistic. Ingrid and I have a really good colleague in Mexico, Mario Lopez, and he’s described water resilience as an infectious idea, one that when it takes hold you are different afterwards, you can’t unsee it, and it permanently changes institutions. And I think we see an acceleration on that point, and what I find, even in many agencies that I talk with around the world is, they may be doing some of their public messaging differently, but their actual work is often much less modified, and really the idea is just rippling out rapidly. I got a text message last week from a colleague in Scotland, saying, ‘I just heard the BBC for the first time use the phrase water resilience,’ and I wanted to do like a virtual fist bump. Because I thought this is in itself a strange sign about in a very brief period of time, you know, from 2019 to now, that this actually has moved into quite mainstream media, even as a need and concept.
BW: But to bring it back to the metaphor I started off with, this institutional infrastructure. We could say that the system is being re-plumbed in some areas and extended in other areas to new partnerships and places that weren’t thinking about this before?
JM: I think that’s exactly right. And I also to follow up on some of Ingrid’s comments. We have companies, for instance, that come to us and say ‘We’re really interested in being a part of the conversation around public policy for water resilience.’ And how does the Water Resilience Tracker include the private sector in corporate action? How does it play out in a community in a city for a mayor? And that’s incredibly powerful, right? We are well on the other side of a tipping point for this particular idea.
BW: Interesting. I guess one final question on the UN climate meeting later this year in Brazil. What sorts of things are you all focused on as you prepare for that. What might we be looking for water to come out of that meeting?
IT: I can start, and maybe if John has anything else he wants to add, you mentioned Brett, our Water Resilience Tracker Project. Brazil was one of the recent graduates or one of the recent countries that we’ve worked. As in the first phase of that. And so we will definitely be there. We’ll be showcasing some of the work that Brazil has been doing on water resilience.
Brazil is about to announce or about to release – there’s these things called NAPs or national adaptation plans – they are releasing 16 sectoral ones this year. And so we’ve been supporting them on their one for water. But not only on water. I’m looking actually across them because our big push on this is that we’re not just interested in the water sector. We’re interested, as John was saying earlier, about how water is kind of this broader enabler of resilience. Across an economy. And so we’ll be there doing some work around that.
More broadly, I guess, in terms of what are we looking at for the for the COP this year? It’s going to be it’s going to be a really challenging COP, I think. It’s a big one. The new nationally determined contributions or NDCs. The commitments that each party makes to the Paris agreement. Those are technically due this year, although most countries have not submitted them yet. So there’s going to be a big push around adaptation with a global goal on adaptation. There’s a bunch of indicators that have been developed. And so those have to be negotiated this year. And then there’s the entire agenda from the previous COP, which most of it did not get finalized in Azerbaijan, in Baku, last year, and that really hinged around the role of climate finance and climate finance is going to continue to play a major role in the discussions at COP 30. It’s a pretty contentious issue, obviously. And as budgets are tightening and priorities are shifting, I don’t really foresee that going away.
So where does water fit? Kind of in all of those discussions, it’s what I mentioned earlier. The space in the official negotiations right now feels like it’s shrinking. But you find water popping up everywhere else. And one of the things that the incoming COP Presidency Brazil, what they’re trying to introduce is this idea of kind of the global mutirão which is like, maybe in English it would be more like mutual aid. So a bottom-up upwelling of climate action and things that are ongoing. It’s very Brazilian style, which I love. But it’s all about collective action and trying to rally civil society and everybody else. The incoming COP President calls it a war on climate change. He uses very militaristic language. But yeah, this idea that it’s going to, you know, really trying to engage everybody and really defending multilateralism.
JM: If I could jump in, just emphasize two points. I’ve been going to COPs since 2009, and I think, Ingrid your first one was probably like 2017 or 2018. So I’m also much older and grayer than Ingrid but from that kind of longer perspective, I want to make two points that I think are really important, especially if you’re mostly just kind of reading COP headlines, that are worth trying to see into them. And the first one is that what was a policy discussion that was really between 20 countries about carbon is now a discussion around 190 countries around carbon and water. And that’s the point that Ingrid’s making that it has become a carbon and water convention. And what’s driven that is that the 170 countries that were not included in that carbon discussion basically revolted over the past seven or eight years, and they said, ‘You haven’t been making good progress on slowing climate change down. We need to do a lot of adaptation, resilience work.’ And the whole focus of the COP has really shifted. I would call it a kind of policy revolt from below that’s occurred. And I think that’s captured very well in this concept that the Brazilians are promoting that we are the global South. And we are dealing with these impacts every day, and we have dire and critical needs. So carbon and water convention is, I think, a good way to think about that the COP process has changed. The second point, and Ingrid alluded to this as well, is called the global goal on adaptation. And what does that really mean? It’s trying to actually be able to measure resilience itself. That’s really difficult. It’s kind of easy, I think, to come up with kind of maybe like a cocktail party version of it, but in terms of practice, that somebody that’s making loans or investing funds, or trying to say we need to grow this sector over that sector that’s actually really challenging. To give you some idea. They started off with around 5,000 draft indicators. They lopped off a zero. They’re just under 500 right now. If they’re smart, they ought to be able to get it down to like 50. Another zero. And this is transformative, actually. I would argue that one of the reasons why we haven’t made as much progress around adaptation resilience issues is because we never had something on this side of the fence that was comparable to what came out of the Paris agreement. We’re going to focus on 1.5°C of change. We’re going to try to limit it at that. That was a single number, and it was completely transformative. All the stuff that we’ve seen around renewable energy in North America and Europe and China and Australia like that was driven by that 1.5 degree number, and if we can come up with a small basket of indicators. I think something actually similarly transformative will happen on A and R, and most of that’s going to be about water.
BW: You care about what you measure, and we manage what we measure. So we’ll have to get you all back on after the meeting to see how these things have went.
IT: Yeah, happy to come back and talk about Belem.
BW: We’ve been talking today with John Matthews and Ingrid Timboe from the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation. This is Speaking of Water, and I’m Brett Walton for Circle of Blue. John, Ingrid, thanks again for being on.
JM: Thanks so much. Brett.
IT: Yeah, thanks for having us.
BW: You can listen to all of Circle Blue’s podcasts at circleofblue.org, and our other reporting on water, climate, and everything they connect. Thanks again.