Water diplomacy and governance: a key to solve the water crisis?"

The Water Governance Facility, a partnership between UN Development Program and the Stockholm International Institute, defines water governance as follows: “Water governance refers to the political, social, economic and administrative systems in place that influence water’s use and management. Essentially, who gets what water, when and how, and who has the right to water and related services, and their benefits.” (www.watergovernance.org, visited 28 august 18). Given such definition, it looks evident that effective and improved water governance can only be based on an in-depth knowledge of the water resource in a given water management unit (region / country / basin). In this presentation, we therefore illustrate how modern information systems, tools and services can be developed for different water functions, supporting sustainable water management and appropriate water governance. We illustrate the new opportunities to improve the knowledge base (big data technology, massive parallel processing of water data, citizen science …), but also show challenges associated with these new technologies, which underpin current developments in hydrological and water management science. We focus in this presentation on groundwater resources for drinking water provision functions.

Virtual water, that is the water used to produce exported products from agriculture and other commodity sectors like mining, has produced multiple effects on the socio-economic and environmental conditions of the producer regions and their populations. Export-related growth and increase of revenue have come together with resource-depletion, socio-environmental conflict and geo-political claims of local and/or national resource-ownership. While trade agreements and multi-scale environmental regulation try to address some of these issues, though in controversial ways, there is still a long way to go through in the construction of water governance arrangements that ensure sustainable water use. Our presentation illustrates this argument with cases of export agriculture and large scale mining in the Mediterranean and South American regions.