GIWS Members Contribute to the UN 2023 Water Conference

As part of the USask/GIWS Delegation led by VPR Professor Baljit Singh, the Dept of Geography and Planning’s Dr. Corinne Schuster-Wallace and Professor John Pomeroy attended and presented at the UN 2023 Water Conference at UN Headquarters in New York, March 21st to 24th. The first UN water conference in a generation, the UN 2023 Water Conference was intended to mobilize Member States, the UN system and stakeholders alike to act and bring successful water sustainability solutions to a global scale. The Conference brought together over 10,000 people, in person or online, including world leaders, civil society, business leaders, young people, scientists, academics, the UN System and others from across sectors — agriculture, energy, environment and water — around a common goal: to urgently tackle the water crisis and set the world back on track to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 – On Clean Water and Sanitation. The Conference included hundreds of side event sessions, including sessions having GEPL involvement that were opened by the UN Secretary General. Those that had GEPL involvement were:

• Water Diplomacy Symposium 2023: A Global Experience Exchange (Schuster-Wallace, participant)
• Multistakeholder Commitments to the Water Action Agenda - Integrated Water and Climate Solutions: From Science to Decisions to Actions (Pomeroy, panelist)
• International Year of Glaciers' Preservation, 2025 (Pomeroy, keynote)
• Elevating Critical Voices in Water Diplomacy (Schuster-Wallace, participant)
• Working with Indigenous Ecological Knowledge to Advance Resiliency (Pomeroy, presenter)
• Women Plus Water lecture “The Climate Crisis is a Water Crisis” (Schuster-Wallace, organiser)
• Co-creation: The New Water Governance Paradigm (Schuster-Wallace, panelist)
• Science-Based Global Water Assessment (Pomeroy, panelist)
• Addressing Water Scarcity to Achieve Climate Resilience and Human Health (Schuster-Wallace, panelist)

Outcomes of these sessions included a path forward to make water solutions more equitable in both design and outcomes and to include Indigenous science, a science outline for the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation (2025), a proposal for an Intergovernmental Panel on Water Sustainability and a global water information system to link model and observational data.

Over 700 commitments at the meeting aimed at driving transformation from a global water crisis to a water-secure world. USask made a water commitment as well as a Global Water Futures statement on water.

~ Author, Professor John Pomeroy, PhD, AGU Fellow, FRGS, FRSC
Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change,
Chairholder, UNESCO Chair in Mountain Water Sustainability,
Distinguished Professor, Dept. of Geography & Planning
Director:
    CFREF Global Water Futures Programme
    USask Centre for Hydrology
    USask Coldwater Laboratory, Canmore, Alberta