• There is clear evidence that cooperation in water issues between communities, sectors and countries can provide economic, social and environmental benefits, besides strengthen peace and regional integration.
• Expert and person of reference in cooperation in the water sector, Josefina Maestu, participates as guest lecturer in the international Master in Sustainable Water Management and Governance in Natural and Agricultural Environments organized by CIHEAM Zaragoza and shares her thoughts about the UN Water Conference 2023.

Josefina Maestu is a water economist and has been advisor to the Secretariat of State of the Environment of the Spanish Ministry of Ecological Transition from 2018 to 2023. One of her most outstanding contributions during this time has been as coordinator of the Green Paper on Water Governance in Spain (Libro Verde de la Gobernanza del Agua en España),published in 2020. Her international career includes 6 years as director of the UN-Water Office (2009-2015), whose headquarters were in Zaragoza, over 10 years as secretary general of the Mediterranean Water Network and over a decade as consultant for the European Commission and several organizations belonging to the European Commission and to the United Nations System such as the World Bank.

As expert and person of reference in cooperation in the water sector, Maestu was invited to participate as one of the lecturers on the International Master in Sustainable Water Management and Governance in Natural and Agricultural Environments, a multidisciplinary training programme delivered by over 90 invited lecturers from universities, research centres, institutions and firms from across the world.

On the ocassion of her participation in the Master, we talked to her about her professional career, about governance, cooperation and her impressions of the UN Water Conference 2023:

The initiative of the Green Paper on Water Governance in Spain that you coordinated, arose as a response to current and future water management challenges. What are the keys to a successful water governance model?

Now is the time for water management. Now is the time to optimize the services provided by our water infrastructure and institutions. With an expected reduction in available resources of 12- 40% in different parts of Spain, it is an urgent national matter. The Green Paper analyses the Spanish model and to what extent it is prepared to respond to these challenges. The key to a successful model is its flexibility and capacity to adapt to different futures, which has a lot to do with the concession system but also with improving the control of water use. This is an issue that was forgotten a long time ago because we were focusing on supply policies.

Your professional career brought you to the city of Zaragoza, where you led the UN-Water Office to support the International Decade for Action “Water for Life”. What would you highlight about that experience?

The UN-Water Office aimed to support the United Nations System and UN Member States to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. It served to coordinate the actions conducted by the UN, civil society and the States in relation to fundamental issues that UN addresses every year as topics of interest. The success of the Water Decade led to the approval by the General Assembly of the United Nations of the Water Decade and the implementation of SDG 6.

40% of the world population live in transboundary water basins and almost 90% of the countries have a shared river basin. How important is cooperation in this context?

According to the UN Conference Concept Note in 2023, there is clear evidence that cooperation in water issues between communities, sectors and countries can provide economic, social and environmental benefits, besides strengthen peace and regional integration. More than six decades of collaboration between the countries of the river Rhine has shown how cooperation can stem from a single objective, such as reduce water pollution and then extend to a more holistic water management focus englobing the whole basin and beyond. The creation of transboundary committees, such as the one in India and Nepal that share the Sharda-Mahakali basin, shows the advantages of transboundary cooperation at local level. For the communities sharing this river basin, cooperation has improved the resilience of the communities to water-related disturbance, for example an early warning system for floods, and has increased the engagement of women in water governance.

Recently, CIHEAM Zaragoza took part in the Mediterranean Water Week, which underlined the importance of training programmes, knowledge transfer and capacity-building to face the consequences of climate change affecting water resources in the Mediterranean region. How, in your opinion, can training help to encourage cooperation in the water sector?

UN-Water has observed that many governments reporting regularly on their efforts in implementing and achieving SDG 6 indicate the lack of institutional, human, financial and technological capacity. Lack of resources in these critical areas jeopardizes their capacity to respond to the challenges faced in water and sanitation and to achieve sustainable of water and sanitation management for everyone.

The students taking CIHEAM Zaragoza’s International Master this year come from Albania, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia and tomorrow will be decision-makers for water management and governance. What advice would you give them?

There are two fundamental things: 1) listen to society and 2) listen to science. Very often governments take action in emergency situations and we forget them. We should always take care to remember these two basic rules.

This year the World Water Day is celebrated with an important UN Water Conference to be held in New York for almost a week. The last conference was held in Mar del Plata in Argentina back in 1977 therefore this is an historic moment. What does the UN Water Conference 2023 entail?

New York has been literally taken over by the water community. There are more than 200 side events outside the UN headquarters, about 250 inside UNHQ and a programme of activities across New York City. This is in addition to the official programme of the 5 Dialogues, and four special events. The Dialogues will address water and human rights to water and sanitation, they will also be discussing climate change - a topic that will permeate the whole conference. They will also discuss transboundary cooperation, the value of water and the importance of cross sectoral water management. Finally, the Dialogues will address institutional mechanisms at global level in water-related issues and what to do in the future.

There are several fundamental issues that are gaining momentum as the World Water Day celebrations approach. The Water Justice movement is mobilizing the community for human rights to water and sanitation and focusing the debate on the rights of the indigenous communities. The Manifesto for Water Justice launched on 21 March reconfirms that "the current water crisis is fundamentally a water justice crisis. Water is a common good and not a commodity, and as such it must be accessible to all without discrimination and under public control”. Nature-based solutions also hold a prominent place. On 22 and 23 March the Nature Hub will be open on the side-lines of the UN Water Conference and has issued a manifesto stating that there can be no ecological security without water security and vice versa.

Issues related to drought and water scarcity are driving the need to strengthen resilience to climate change. In this context, it is the African countries that are leading the need for responses to a challenge that is destroying lives and the economic base upon which they depend.

The presentation of the conclusions from the Global Commission of the Economics of Water in one of the special events of the conference is raising great interest.  Particularly to present the need for water management as a global common good and what this involves in terms of, for example, the financing practices of multilateral financial institutions. Reconsidering the institutions that arose from Breton Woods and whether or not they are suitable to achieve SDG 6 may have consequences. Actually, financing Governments doesn’t always mean improvements in access to basic water and sanitation services for the most vulnerable.

The need for changes in global water governance is one of the issues that the countries of the European Union have been debating in recent months in preparation for the United Nations Conference. They are discussing the creation of an annual or six-monthly intergovernmental conference to coordinate the cooperation of the governments in water-related issues within the framework of the UN. There are discussions about launching a "water panel" that draws up reports similar to those issued by the Climate Change panel for these conferences. There has also been a proposal for the creation of a special envoy of the secretary general of the United Nations for water to support the Human Rights Rapporteur and the Chairperson of the internal coordination mechanism of the UN agencies.

The conference will end without a statement or agreed resolution but the organizers wish to move forward to present a UN resolution to strengthen some of these proposals, particularly the Decade of Water for Sustainable Development. The countries’ commitments in the "Agenda for Water Action" with voluntary commitments for which a monitoring system will be set up.

We are at a crossroads where our economic structure and our welfare are going to depend to a great extent on the decisions that we made today on how to address climate change and the need to improve resilience. The objectives are no longer growth, but of resilience and it is based on this new paradigm that we should address water management in the future.