Most important thing first: the Water and Climate Coalition is now launched! 

On Thursday 3 June during our side event at the negotiations here in Bonn the Coalition was officially launched. It now takes it first trembling steps in the corridors at the negotiations and of course in the lobby.  But as you probably know from earlier reports from Swedish Water House, the work with advocating water and climate linkages is not new, but it is now entering into a new and exciting phase. 
 
Counting SIWI and Stakeholder Forum, the Coalition has got 9 members so far. During the launch at the Side Event the Coalition managed to attract more potential members and people in the audience expressed their interest both in receiving more information about the Coalition and giving input to its work. All in all a successful event.

The day before, on 2 June, the 2nd Water Day took place here in Bonn. Although we had some difficulties in gathering a big audience, probably due to both hectic programmes for delegates as well as the location of the venue, the Water Day turned into a day of fruitful discussions that we can build on in our further work of raising the profile of water at the climate negotiations.

From the negotiations, there is not much concrete outcome to report back on yet.  The most substantial progress so far is that the architecture of the financial structures and the promised fast start funding from e.g. EU has become slightly clearer. Though, at the European Union's side event on fast-start-funding, we noticed that EU didn’t highlight any water related projects, which can be interpreted as water not being recognised as a prioritised area for either adaptation or mitigation action.  Let’s just hope that some of the fast start funding will actually go to water management related projects in the South – because those projects are desperately needed.

That is exactly what was demonstrated during Water Day, which brought together experts from the water and climate community sharing their views on why it is important to bridge the two agendas and highlighting the need for projects being carried out on the ground. “The need to adapt to climate change is urgent and water plays a pivotal role in it and it actually offers development opportunities”, Avinash Tyagi underlined in his speech when presenting a pre-release of a new report from UN-Water. Avinash continued by saying that that link is not recognised by politicians and in policies.

Basically that is the reason why the water and climate coalition is present here in Bonn. The speakers during Water Day offered key messages for the negotiations and stressed the need for water to be included in an international framework so that governments can get incitements to consider water resources management as a climate adaptation measure.

by Hanna Wolf, Swedish Water House