Is water important in climate policy? It seems obvious. Water has a well-established link as the medium of most negative climate impacts. Yet when it comes to addressing the climate crisis, the answer depends very much on who you ask.

For many, the connection is clear. The IPCC’s 2022 AR6 report strikingly called for the majority of adaptation and resilience efforts to be “water based.” The new U.S. Global Water Security Strategy, drafted this year, has a strong alignment between water and sanitation, water resources management, and climate resilience and adaptation; water and climate policy are convergent paths in that strategy. The World Bank is now publishing a series of climate-centric national development strategies (Country Climate and Development Reports), some of which place a core organizational emphasis on water for long-term economic development.

Yet questions linger. The 2015 Paris Agreement — the most important climate policy breakthrough in history — has no mention of water. The UNFCCC has historically described water as a “sector” on par with other sectors, such as forests, energy, and cities.

Global climate policy is a well-organized process, which currently plays out through annual UN climate change conferences — typically referred to as “COPs” or Conferences of the Parties. They began in 1994 as the primary vehicle for international climate negotiations, hosted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and generally break down into two main areas: a formal negotiation space and a “trade show” or “climate expo” space.

As observers at this year’s COP27’s negotiations in the Sinai Desert city of Sharm el-Sheikh, we were eager to see precisely what role water played in the Egypt climate conference. We’ve been attending COPs for a long time. (One of us has attended since 2009.) Sometimes COPs have significant drama associated with them, such as around a sensitive political issue or the expectation of nearing a major agreement. The biggest stage remains COP21 in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed. Egypt is likely to be remembered as a “between” COP, building up to more substantive issues that will be finalized next year.

And like Sinai itself, COPs also have been largely desiccated of water issues from their beginning. In 2009. Brazil sent some 600 delegates to COP15, but only one member of that team focused on water issues. As adaptation and resilience have risen as agenda items, so has the explicit mention of water resources as both a hazard, sector, and — increasingly — a medium of resilience.

So we went looking for water in the Egyptian desert, Here is some of what we found.

Location Location Location

Visually, the negotiation space hasn’t changed that much over the years: a series of massive windowless tents, subdivided into a plenary room, smaller meeting spaces, and delegation offices.

The negotiations are quite formal, with observer groups sitting on the periphery while Parties—country representatives—sit at rectangular tables with their country name listed on a paper sign in front of them. People argue passionately, but in quite formal legal language. Most people at the table are in foreign ministries rather than technical institutions. Sometimes screens televise negotiations. Other times the Parties kick out anyone that is not a formal negotiator in order to discuss issues deemed politically sensitive.

There are established stars and personalities, and some specialists in the climate policy space are even revered for their achievements. The language is technical and the issues change over time. Currently, the characteristics of good national climate plans (NDCs) are a major issue, as is a new form of climate finance called loss and damage. Quite technical discussions are occurring about how we should track and measure progress on climate adaptation (GGA, or the global goal on adaptation). Can we just count the money we’ve spent in the space? How do we know if we’ve had a useful impact?

Alongside the official UNFCCC negotiation processes, a growing number of civil society and non-state actors are present and active at the conference. COP26 in Glasgow saw the biggest jump in terms of registered non-state actors while COP27 pushed those numbers even higher, with over 13,000 registered NGO or IGO participants traveling to Sharm el-Sheikh.

Historically, civil society representatives primarily focused on either protesting the conference or supporting the negotiations from an external area known as the “Green Zone.” However, over the past few years, there has been an expansion of the conference space to include dozens of pavilions within the securitized “Blue Zone,” each of which form their own “conference-within-a-conference” showcasing different interest groups or countries, as well as providing space for networking and dealmaking.

Indeed, the far more massive “expo” atmosphere is lively, noisy, with many participants sporting native dress, young people chanting, loudspeakers competing for people passing by, and wine and beer receptions in the evenings to bring in more people. You might see a movie star or billionaire. Yet the expo also feels physically and emotionally distant from the negotiations COP.

The private sector has fueled the greatest expansion in participation in the expo. In fact, the corporatization of COP has meant  that this year’s conference included over 600 fossil fuel industry representatives, up from around 500 in Glasgow. And while there is often a disconnect between the pavilions and the negotiations, there is evidence that lobbying efforts to neuter COP decisions is working. Passionate calls from many countries to include language related to the phase down (or phase out) fossil fuels in the COP27 cover decision were overruled at the last minute by negotiators from several Parties—including the Arab States bloc, which represents 22 MENA countries and is filled with lobbyists for various oil and gas interests. Their inclusion at COP27, along with major polluters such as Coca-Cola or Meta, has been widely criticized by civil society actors, activists, and grassroots organizations, and has undermined the credibility of the UNFCCC process as a whole.

Is Water Important in the COP? 

In the negotiations, water matters more than it ever has. Both the 2022 and 2023 COPs are being hosted by MENA region countries facing high levels of water insecurity, which has certainly helped put water on the agenda. Having water explicitly mentioned multiple times in the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan (also known as the COP27 Cover Decision) is certainly a win for those of us who care about building effective adaptation and resilience programs. For the first time in a COP cover decision, Parties recognize the key role that water plays in climate action, and urges countries to include water-related targets in their national climate plans.

Yet in some ways, water is more visible in the expo. The international water community sponsored its first Blue Zone pavilion at COP26, with a follow-up effort hosted by Egypt this year. This official space for water has allowed hundreds of water actors to engage in COP, many for the first time. While greatly expanding participation by the water community, the water pavilion has arguably reinforced silos between the water and climate communities. Prior to having a dedicated pavilion space, those few of us working on water and climate issues were forced to spread out and permeate other spaces. This allowed for greater dissemination of our messages across a wider range of venues. The advent of the water pavilion removed the incentive to engage in other spaces, listen to new voices, learn from different sectors and perspectives, or address the climate community agenda. This development is not limited to the water community – the proliferation of pavilions has meant that many different interest groups are only talking amongst themselves, about increasingly niche, self-interested issues.

The profile of water at the COP has certainly been raised.  However, it is unclear whether this increased attention will result in meaningful action. If we are to successfully build thriving, resilient communities, water resilience must not be limited to a single sector or strategy. It must be incorporated into economic development planning and finance writ large. Initiatives like the UNFCCC’s Adaptation Academy – which includes a strong curriculum on water-based adaptation – or AGWA’s Water Tracker for National Climate Planning aim to address these systemic challenges. In both cases, these initiatives strengthen the Paris Agreement by building efficacy and capacity for NDCs that reach across ministries and sectors. They both imply that economic development also needs to be water-centric resilient development, so that tradeoffs between infrastructure, sectors such as energy and agriculture, and ecosystems are durable, promote stability, and can respond to emerging and uncertain conditions.

The Global/Local Divide 

Though we were focused on how water flowed into the COP27 discussions, it was hard to miss larger trends and patterns.

COP27 was framed by Egypt as an implementation COP. As Parties begin to implement their national climate plans, they are grappling with two major issues: finance and capacity development. On finance, COP27 saw a major breakthrough in the issue of loss and damage, which refers to the concept of paying developing countries for the adverse impacts they have suffered due to climate change. While there is a strong moral and ethical case to be made for this, it is unclear what a UN-managed loss and damage fund will look like in practice, how it will operate, who is eligible to both contribute or receive funds, and how it will ensure compliance. Will it reduce available and planned funds for more long-term interventions, such as addressing future sea-level rise or desertification? While there are still more questions than answers when it comes to funding loss and damage, the agreement represents a major win for developing countries who have pushed for this option for years.

But progress on loss and damage also represents reversal on the fundamental aspects of the Paris Agreement: mitigating future climate change and adapting to its unavoidable impacts. As Maldives negotiator Sabra Ibrahim Noordeen sharply noted in her closing statement, “Why are [developing countries] trying to address loss and damage? Because we have failed at mitigation and adaptation.” This failure means that countries face increasingly expensive and extreme adaptation options—when they have options at all. And these options are unlikely to be covered by the new fund. Efforts to build domestic capacity are urgently needed. Existing climate funds such as the GCF do include funding mechanisms for this type of support, but these funds remain highly bureaucratic and difficult to access. 

Moving forward, there have been calls to fundamentally reassess the role of annual COPs as the flagship event for the UNFCCC, instead emphasizing regional meetings such as the UNFCCC Regional Climate Weeks, which bring together more technically oriented state and civil society actors. In this scenario, COPs would focus more on tracking the progress of national commitments and plans under the Paris Agreement and less on showcasing specific countries or specialized interests.

Yet a focus on local action and capacity support activities is one area where the COP expo as presently developed really shines. What was clear from our time in the Resilience Hub, Water Pavilion, and Climate Action Hub is that bottom-up support for climate resilience has never been stronger. But this remains stubbornly divorced from the negotiations space. Formal processes like the Global Stocktake (GST), which is currently assessing collective progress on global climate action, remains focused on Party actions and limits the representation of civil society actors, who are responsible for most of the work happening on the ground. If the GST is to be a truly comprehensive assessment, then a wider set of voices must be included. 

While water is a global issue, it is also an intensely local resource. It is much easier to saturate the COP discussion at regional meetings where linkages between sectors are less abstract—and actors are more familiar with local water conditions, as well as with the solutions that might make the greatest difference. Thus, we strongly support any efforts to downscale to a more operational level, while preserving the global framework for Parties to discuss collective action. The world is thirsty for greater ambition and action to combat the climate emergency, but COP27 proved to be more mirage than oasis for those of us who went into the desert hoping to make progress.