Animesh Gain

Water diplomacy has emerged as a critical approach for promoting cooperation, preventing conflict, and ensuring equitable and sustainable water management across various scales, including community, subnational, and transboundary levels. However, the presence of uncertainty poses significant challenges to the effectiveness of water diplomacy efforts. This chapter investigates the scientific uncertainties in water diplomacy that pervade transboundary water management and negotiations. While the water diplomacy framework is applicable across multiple scales, the specific focus of this chapter is on the transboundary level. A comprehensive review is conducted to assess the extent to which existing global transboundary cooperation treaties account for uncertainty. Subsequently, various sources of uncertainty, including both variability (aleatory) and epistemic uncertainties in transboundary water resource assessment and management, are investigated. To illustrate the impact of uncertainties on diplomatic endeavors and decision-making processes, a case study of the Ganges River Basin is presented. The findings highlight the intricate relationship between scientific uncertainties and water diplomacy, emphasizing the need for robust approaches to address and navigate uncertainties in transboundary water negotiations.

There is an urgent need for coordinated WEFE policies in the Mediterranean to address water scarcity, food and energy insecurity, ecosystem health, and potential conflicts exacerbated by climate change. However, countries in the MENA region currently lack an integrated policy framework that connects water resources management, energy, food, and ecosystems. Given the profound impact of climate change on food and water security, implementing integrated, transformative, inclusive and WEFE-based policies in the MENA region is imperative in order to effectively manage water, energy, and food resources. Coordinated WEFE policies should take into account the intricate interconnections between biophysical and socio-economic systems. Transboundary considerations are also crucial, as policies in one country can affect WEFE security regionally and locally due to the inherent production and consumption linkages in global markets and trade. When designing WEFE nexus policies within the Mediterranean region, it is essential to account for their effects on other sectors, ecosystems, and countries through market interactions.

Governance for the WEFE nexus requires strengthened connections and better management through coordination, integration, coherence, and collaboration between actors and their respective strategies and actions, rather than through the creation of new institutions. In the Mediterranean Basin, especially in southern countries, there is insufficient cooperation between science and policy, with stakeholders often expressing different, and sometimes incompatible, goals, agendas, and priorities. Enhancing the science-policy interface in these countries presents an opportunity for integrated WEFE planning, management, and governance. It is imperative to avoid siloed approaches and instead focus on hybrid governance modes and policy instruments that are holistic and long-term. Citizens’ assemblies based on deliberative processes can help overcome some limitations of current democratic systems and practices in responding to the climate crisis. WEFE challenges and interlinkages in the Mediterranean region can be more efficiently addressed by referring to frameworks such as social-ecological resilience, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or the 2050 Vision on Biodiversity.

Most projects funded under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research, such as ARIMNET and ERANETMED, have focused on technological and social innovations in the WEFE domains, and particularly water-ecosystem and energy-ecosystem links. Public-Private Partnerships have proven to be effective funding mechanisms for the WEFE nexus. Projects under Horizon 2020 and PRIMA programmes have significantly improved capacity-building and awareness among involved partners regarding WEFE components.

Water, a vital resource transcending geopolitical borders, significantly influences the socio-economic and ecological well-being of nations. With expanding global populations and climate change intensifying water scarcity, the importance of effective water diplomacy in averting conflicts and encouraging cooperation grows. This chapter explores water diplomacy as a tool for addressing intricate, boundary-crossing challenges, emphasizing its function in fostering collaboration, managing shared resources, and guaranteeing equitable and sustainable water governance. We introduce an enhanced water diplomacy framework that integrates complexity theory, contingency theory and negotiation theory, providing a holistic approach to water resource management. Moreover, we propose a devising seminar - an off-the-record, facilitated workshop gathering a diverse array of core stakeholders who ordinarily would not participate in face-to-face problem-solving due to political and institutional barriers - to overcome initial obstacles in resolving complex issues. Through the analysis of the Ganges river basin, this chapter seeks to inform policymakers, practitioners and researchers about the potential of efficient water diplomacy in promoting regional stability, nurturing international cooperation and ensuring long-lasting sustainable management of water resources.

Bangladesh is considered one of the water-abundant countries in the world. However, the aggregated water security is very low in Bangladesh compared to other countries such as India, the USA, China, and Australia. This is mainly due to flood risk, impaired water quality, governance, and transboundary management. Due to high flood risks and high arsenic concentration in the groundwater, along with transboundary complexities, Bangladesh faces high levels of water insecurity. The security issues are more vulnerable in places with low income, poorly managed, and hard-to-reach areas, especially in the coastal areas of Bangladesh. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of water security for the coastal areas in Bangladesh. In this paper, we conceptualize the term ‘security’ as a function of ‘availability,’ ‘accessibility to services,’ ‘safety and quality,’ and ‘management’ and review the increasing body of literature on these criteria in Bangladesh in the first place.

This chapter updates the conceptual KULTURisk framework and its implementation methods (SERRA or Socio-Economic Regional Risk Assessment) for integrated (physical and economical) risk assessment and evaluation of risk prevention benefits in the field of water-related processes. The framework (i.e., named after the European project within which it originated) and the SERRA approach were developed upon preexisting methods, with four main innovation aims: (1) to include the social capacities of reducing vulnerability and risk, (2) to operationalize the assessment of exposed assets and the benefits of risk reduction measures by including a monetary estimation of costs and benefits, (3) to estimate intangible and indirect costs, and (4) to improve the ability to track uncertainty in estimated values. We build on the well-established Hazard-Vulnerability-Exposure framework, but vulnerability is expanded to consider the interactions between physical (territorial) characteristics, susceptibility, and capacities of socioeconomic systems to adapt and cope with specific hazards, and it is here formulated as a nondimensional index ranging between 0 and 1. Exposure is instead assessed in monetary terms, and thus the multiplicative combination of two indices ranging between 0 and 1 (hazard and vulnerability) with a third one (exposure) expressed in monetary terms produces a monetary quantification of risk, which can be used for supporting decisions via cost–benefit analysis. Operational solutions are proposed to evaluate four possible socioeconomic costs deriving from the adverse consequences of floods, namely direct/indirect and tangible/intangible costs. The proposed methodology aims to be comprehensive concerning the set of receptors usually considered in the literature of regional risk assessment. The sets of receptors considered are people, economic activities, categorized as (1) buildings; (2) infrastructures; and (3) agriculture and cultural heritage and ecosystems. By applying the framework to the eastern part of Dhaka city, Bangladesh, we illustrate how SERRA can be implemented to support decision-makers identifying robust risk management solutions in a highly uncertain context, by simulating key climate and socioeconomic variables and their uncertainty, and by utilizing data mining to extract useful information for decision-makers. Results are summarized and communicated using decision trees that describe a categorized view of the vulnerabilities of the proposed risk reduction measures, by identifying the states and combinations of key variables that could determine considerable failures.

The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report assesses the impacts of climate change, looking at ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels. It also reviews vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of the natural world and human societies to adapt to climate change.

This chapter assesses observed and projected climate-induced changes in the water cycle, their current impacts and future risks on human and natural systems and the benefits and effectiveness of water-related adaptation efforts now and in the future.

Agricultural conversion of land and rapid urbanization are the primary drivers of land cover and land use change (LCLUC) globally, resulting in massive deforestation, drainage of wetlands, effects on the water cycle, alteration of sediment budgets, and acceleration of land degradation and desertification. This has taken place across various spatial and temporal scales. This chapter provides an overview of hydrological impact of land use change at these multiple scales. It also reviews the state of the art in analyzing LCLUC impacts on water quality outcomes and showcases where different techniques have been used to reveal the relationship between the two. Finally, the chapter addresses the impacts LCLUC generated within entire basins can have on delta landscapes, which constitute very dynamic and fragile environments with typically high economic activities and population densities.

While research into the nexus has expanded significantly, few studies have sought to theorize its governance. By adopting a policy instruments perspective, this chapter therefore initially examines how the nexus is emerging at different scales and national contexts worldwide. Empirical evidence of policy instrument innovation is then analyzed using conventional governance theories to argue that the holistic nature of the nexus concept requires new theorizing to interpret this emerging reality. Normative suggestions for theorizing future nexus governance are also forwarded.

This chapter presents a conceptual framework (KULTURisk Framework or KR-FWK) and its implementation methods (SERRA or Socio-Economic Regional Risk Assessment) for integrated (physical and economical) risk assessment and evaluation of risk prevention benefits in the field of water-related processes. The KR-FWK (i.e. from the name of the European project within which it originated) and the SERRA approach were developed upon preexisting proposals, with three main innovation aims: (1) to include the social capacities of reducing vulnerability and risk, (2) to provide an operational solution to assess risks, impacts, and the benefits of plausible risk reduction measures, by including a monetary estimation of costs and benefits, and (3) to go beyond the estimation of direct tangible costs. Vulnerability is considered as a result of the interactions between physical (territorial) characteristics and the susceptibility and the capacities of the socioeconomic system to adapt and cope with a specific hazard, expressed as a nondimensional index ranging between 0 and 1. Exposure, is instead assessed in monetary terms, and thus the multiplicative combination of two indices ranging between 0 and 1 (hazard and vulnerability) with a third one (exposure) expressed in monetary terms produces a monetary quantification of risk, which can be used for supporting decisions via cost-benefit analysis. Regarding the third aim of going beyond the estimation of direct tangible damages, operational solutions are proposed to evaluate four possible socioeconomic costs possibly deriving from the adverse consequences of flood, namely direct/indirect and tangible/intangible costs. The proposed methodology aims to be comprehensive with respect to the set of receptors usually considered in the literature of regional risk assessment. The sets of receptors considered are people, economic activities, categorized as (1) buildings; (2) infrastructures; and (3) agriculture and cultural heritage and ecosystems. We show how to apply SERRA and the KR-FWK in the case of Dhaka/Lower Brahmaputra/Bangladesh, by reusing elaborations already done or in progress and by developing some minimal new work; e.g. to demonstrate indirect/intangible costs.