The way forward
The following sections align with each of the five ‘accelerators’ of the .
Governance
Leveraging water for peace involves governance arrangements that both avoid and manage conflicts. The most prominent mechanisms include international frameworks and norms for meeting the human rights to water and protecting water sources and infrastructure, particularly during armed conflicts and in transboundary settings.
Equitable governance arrangements, designed to manage competing demands, are required to navigate tensions and redress injustices. These include rules for establishing and (re)allocating access across water uses, and navigating difficult, sometimes conflicting, policy objectives involving agricultural, energy, health, infrastructure and investment.
The promise of full, equitable benefit-sharing has been difficult to realize. Win–win outcomes can involve hidden costs, benefits are not easily measured and quantified, and outcomes are not necessarily evenly distributed (for example in cases where water flows from agriculture to cities but the cities capture the largest share of the benefits).
Education and capacity development
Freshwater is vital for human prosperity; yet humankind’s efforts to provide clean water and sanitation for all is falling behind, as the indicators of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 clearly show.
The lack of training and relevant skill sets delays the adoption of new technologies for water treatment, sanitation and integrated river basin management, among others – which, in turn, leads to wasteful use of water, avoidable contamination of freshwater resources, and inappropriate levels of access to safe and clean water.
While the gap between technical needs and available capacity may be widening, it is even more acute in educational undertakings aimed at enhancing legal, policy and institutional frameworks to support them.
Capacity-building needs in Pacific Island countries
A significant push for increasing water sector capacities will be required to achieve SDG 6 targets in the Pacific. Only 60% of Pacific Islanders have access to basic drinking water and a mere 33% to basic sanitation, with the latter being the lowest rate recorded in the world (UNICEF, 2022). In addition to various governance, poor policy, legislation and ownership issues, a substantial gap in human capacity is also reported.
Due to a lack of human capacity in water resource management, existing facilities are not operationally optimized, and an estimated 1,000 out of 8,500 employees in the sector require training on a yearly basis. This finding illustrates the human and financial resource constraints faced by the Pacific Island countries. A perception survey carried out in the Nadi catchment in Fiji found that Pacific Islanders employ traditional community-based approaches to manage water resources. With further training and the right tools, community managers can strengthen existing water resource management (Wilson et al., 2022).
Financing
Ensuring adequate water and sanitation services for communities and businesses requires making better use of existing sources of finance and mobilizing new ones. Critically, all solutions to the water crisis will require capital, including significant international financial support for the developing world.
There is a need to make better use of existing sources of finance and to mobilize new capital, including greater international support for developing countries. Rigorous assessments of the impacts and benefits of investments can create new financing opportunities.
Water-related investments, instruments and arrangements can be designed to equitably distribute the costs and benefits across various stakeholders. Valuations can inform policy instruments such as water tariffs, taxes, charges, and permits or offset markets. Similarly, these principles can inform voluntary financing arrangements that link potential returns to an investment, to encourage local actors to provide non-repayable capital for investments that provide operational benefits.
A better understanding of water-related risks can encourage financial actors to engage with companies to invest in mitigating those risks.
Science, technology and information
Advances in science have played a critical role in technological development and innovation within the water sector. This has led to the development of innovative tools and approaches to measure and monitor parameters of the hydrosphere such as the earth observation and space technology through the deployment of satellites and remote sensing; advanced sensor technology to monitor hydrological systems; the rise of citizen science supported by low-cost technologies; and the application of ‘big data’ analytics.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been proposed to help address challenges across water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) systems, water use in agriculture and industry, and water resources management. The overall impacts of AI remain largely unknown. Potential risks include system-wide compromise owing to design errors, malfunction and cyber-attacks, which could in turn lead to critical infrastructure failure in a worst-case scenario. Information technology companies are becoming increasingly water-intensive due to the liquid cooling systems of the computers that run AI programmes and additional electricity required to power the equipment.
Data and information
Open and transparent sharing of data and information is essential to effective water management, thereby promoting peace and prosperity within society.
Data on water quantity and especially water quality remain sparse, due in large part to weak monitoring and reporting capacity. This is especially the case in many low-income countries in Africa and Asia.
A significant proportion of countries are characterized by very limited or inexistent groundwater monitoring networks, owing to the cost of development, operation and maintenance.
Water resource systems cannot be effectively designed and operated unless adequate data and information are available concerning location, quantity, quality, temporal variability and demand. Reliable hydrological data are needed to adaptively manage resources, to calibrate remotely sensed observations, and for modelling. Government agencies tasked with resource monitoring and management often lack the capacity to collect data and perform the analyses required to address water-related economic and social challenges.
Risks associated with cyber-attacks
The number of reported cyber-attacks on critical water infrastructure – including drinking water supply, wastewater and sewerage treatment, dams and canals – has increased in recent years (Tuptuk et al., 2021). These risks are expected to rise owing to the development and increasing uptake of cyber-physical water systems, that integrate computational and physical capabilities in order to control and monitoring processes. In the past, water system security was achieved largely through physical isolation, limiting access to control components. However, with the emergence of the Internet of Things,a water systems are increasingly using a smart systems philosophy, incorporating analytics into industrial control systems to improve the sensing and control capacity (Bello et al., 2023; Tuptuk et al., 2021).
“Cyber-attacks could be launched remotely by employing command and control techniques to interrupt the system’s performance and provide access to illegitimate parties to critical and confidential information. Moreover, in more severe cases, such attacks can even cause physical impairment to the system’s structure. Furthermore, such attacks can hamper the water quality by changing the treatment systems or suppressing contamination warnings by affecting water quality sensors” (Bello et al., 2023, p. 2). The implications on society are potentially serious and multi-faceted. Cyber-attacks may affect services of critical infrastructure for drinking water, wastewater treatment and sewerage, agricultural production and food systems, energy generation, navigation, and disaster management (including floods and droughts) (Gleick, 2006; Amin et al., 2012; Copeland, 2010).
Governments are developing cyber-security plans to safeguard critical water infrastructure. To mitigate risks, personnel needs to be trained to assess and identify threats to water infrastructure (Bello et al., 2023; Moraitis et al., 2020; Hassanzadeh et al., 2020; Adepu and Mather, 2016). Measures include regular cyber-security assessments and incident response plans, vigilant monitoring of water system treatment processes, along with access controls encryption, firewalls, anti-virus measures, back-ups and multi-factor authentication (Waterfall, 2023).
Full chapters
Consult chapter 9-12 of the UN World Water Development Report 2024, Water for Prosperity and Peace