A COMMITMENT TO THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT : THE ROLE OF
GEF AND INTERNATIONAL WATERS

Andrea Merla

Global Environment Facility
1818 H Street NW - Washington, DC 20433 USA

The Global Environment Facility was created in 1990 to protect the global environment. GEF grants facilitate international cooperation in specific high priority areas : climate change, biodiversity, ozone depletion and international waters. The rapid deterioration being experienced by international waters is one of the most complex and dramatic global environmental issue the international community is facing today: the tragedy of the Aral sea is a reminder that damage can become irreversible and precious ecosystems may be forever lost. GEF commitment is to enhance national and international efforts in confronting these challenges in an integrated and comprehensive way financing through grants the incremental costs of programs that address the protection and sustainable use of Large Marine Ecosystems and of international river and underground water basins. This presentation describes the GEF operational strategy and shows how multi-country cooperation can address the global water crisis.

Water dominates our planet. The Earth contains approximately 1.4 million cubic kilometers of water, but about 97.4 per cent of this is sea or brackish water, not readily available for most human uses. About three-quarters of the remaining 2.6 per cent is locked up in icecaps and glaciers, leaving only a fraction of a percentage point of the world’s total water resources as fresh water in rivers and lakes or in underground acquifers. Even so this available fresh water is theoretically sufficent to supply for the essential human needs of a population of 20 billion people. Unfortunately fresh water is not evenly distributed throughout Earth’s continents and climate’s seasonal and longer period variations make its availability uneven and often unpredictable. Quantity is hence limited at a global scale and increasingly unsufficent in large highly populated areas of our planet. We are approaching "water crisis" in several regions: per capita water availability is presently as low as 1,247 cubic meters per year in the Middle East and North Africa, compared to 23,103 cubic meters in Latin America.

As our numbers have grown to over 5 billion, we are realizing at last that our waters, however vast, are under enormous stress and that the social and economic development of many people in many parts of the world is imperiled. Competition for water for farming, human consumption and industry has often throughout the course of history been cause for conflicts and tensions between nations and where water supplies failed great civilisations collapsed. Water conflicts among nations will certainly increase and get worse as reasource availability and quality become more and more uncertain. It has to be recognised that on most continents, sustainable development cannot proceed without causing enormous disputes among countries which need to share their water resources.

Contamination of international freshwater basins is growing across the globe. While transboundary rivers suffer from pollution on every continent, lakes and riverside aquifers have been particularly hard hit because of their extreme environmental vulnerability. Worldwide, the linkage of freshwater basin contamination to marine ecosystems degradation is becoming apparent as pollutants from inland areas slowly migrate into many regional seas. Pollution loads from inland areas affect portions of the Mediterranean, estuaries of Asia from the Bay of Bengal to the Yellow Sea and the South China Sea, coastal population centers of Africa, the Plata estuary in South America and the coasts of the United States. The costs of remediation are prohibitive: US$ 20-30 billion will be needed to address pollution and habitat in the Baltic Sea. Even more will be necessary to restore the eutrophic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the Missisippi River pollution or to reduce contamination in the Volga that is plauguing the Caspian Sea.

These interconnections among freshwater and saltwater systems are very complex with multiple causes of ecosystem degradation resulting in tremendous social impacts. Pollution, the conversion of important wetland habitats (e.g.: loss of mangroves due to conversion to shrimp ponds in Asia) and overfishing create enormous problems and transboundary conflicts. All 15 oceanic fisheries are being exploited at or beyond capacity and 13 are in a state of decline, some possibly lost forever. There is a serious threat to food security in the near future that has transboundary water implications.

Over the last two decades, there has been an evolution in water resources management thinking - from the Mar del Plata Conference in the 1970s to the Law of the Sea Convention in the 1980s and the Dublin Statement and Agenda 21 in the 1990s. This evolution has resulted in a consensus that a more comprehensive approach to water resources management is needed - one that is cross sectoral in nature, that integrates ecological and development needs, and that is based on protecting the ecological sustainability of the water environment. This new approach represents a purposeful shift from sector by sector projects to a more holistic approach recognising the river basin as the appropriate unit for managing not only water quality, quantity and ecosystems but also sectoral development initiatives.

This Conference is a clear demonstration that at the highest levels in governments recognition is being given that water and watersheds must be considered as valuable natural resources to meet multiple uses and that mismanagement of surface and groundwater resources and water environment are a significant impediment towards poverty reduction and sustainable development.

The Global Environment Facility has been a courageous answer of the international community to these fundamental concerns. It is a permanent financial mechanism established in 1994, after a successfull pilot phase, to respond to global environmental challenges in the focal areas of climate change, biodiversity, ozone depletion and international waters. The Facility, with its over $2 billion trust fund, is open to universal participation and builds upon the partnership between the UNDP, UNEP and the World Bank, its implementing agencies.

GEF International Waters Projects

In International Waters GEF’s role is to stress the creation of partnerships to advance sustainable development. Through the joint effort of participating riparian nations, and with the active support of the three GEF Agencies - each with its comparative advantage and skills - a sense of trust can be built so that the results of GEF inteventions can be mainstreamed into development financing strategies with the ultimate goal of socially and environmentally sustainable development

With a few exceptions, work within the international waters area of the GEF is built around the concept of multi-country collaboration focused on a priority transboundary issue. Generally a GEF IW project begins as a result of multiple countries working with one or more GEF implementing agencies to undertake necessary strategic work. This is done so that collaborating nations can each establish an interministerial technical team - with participation from sub-national levels of governemnt, from the private sector and the NGO community - to assemble information on the water related environmental problems/conflicts and share this information with collegues from other nations in a committee setting. In this way a Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis (TDA) can be produced that contains the facts of the dispute, a decsription of the conflict or problem and opportunity which might exist. In essence, riaprian countries can try the process of "informed negotiated consent" and focus on sharing facts and jointly determine how to go forward. The work of assembling the TDA establishes the basis for the countries themselves to determine clear priorities for action and it also allows very complex basin problems to be divided into smaller, more manageable ones, each with a specific action programme for resolution. As part of the process, the countries determine what actions, policy changes, regulatory developments and sectoral programmes are needed to resolve the priority problems, threats or conflicts. The multinational committees consider these actions, formulate a Strategic Action Programme endorsed at the highest levels in governments and at the same time determine what national actions each country will undertake (with help of implementing agency regular programmes) to incorporate the necessary actions into the country programmes, policies and economic development plans. These steps allow for harmonization of actions among nations so that unfair economic advantages do not accrue.

The World Bank is then asked to hold a donors’ meeting at the end of the process, so that donors can be matched up with specific needs for resolving transboundary problems, for building capacity of the regional joint collaborative institution and for funding baseline and additional (GEF grant financing) interventions. In the process a further discovery is being made: although the concerns of international waters seem more complex than any other global environmental issue, the holistic water-system approach may help provide ways of solving other global problems as well. In fact, actions to protect biodiversity and fight land degradation, which are often national, can be integrated into regional water-systems protection initiatives with relative ease.

There are those who will undoubtedly argue that the GEF process which has been briefly described is too time consuming, too resource intensive and that in many cases the cost of rehabilitation can never be met. We should respond that the process is time consuming, it is resource intensive, and the cost will be high. We would add, however, that the costs of inaction in restoring a sustainable water environment are even greater. The tragedy of the Aral Sea disaster with its total social, economic and ecosystem disruption must never again be allowed to happen. Lessons have been learned over and over.

The GEF has supported collaborative IW projects in freshwater basins in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. There are also GEF IW projects in many of the world’s Large Marine Ecosystems.

From Lake Victoria to the Danube, from the Black Sea to the Okavango, from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Guinea, to the Bermejo river. The task seems overwhelming. How to coordinate industry, trade, transport, agriculture, fisheries, science, environment, development, politics, waste management and diverse populations? How to involve various international agencies, levels of governement, the private sector and non governmental organisations? How to forge coordinated international action when upstream nations see little direct benefit in stopping pollution that affects downstream users; when coastal nations see little incentive for protecting wetlands that sustain ocean fisheries used by other nations; when countries with transboundary groundwater supplies feel no obligation to protect recharge zones in their territory from degradation that affects the wells of their neighbours?

It may take 10 to 20 years of concerted global efforts to solve these complex problems. However, constructive elements of holistic cooperation are already becoming evident in some of the IW projects of the GEF.

The first steps are being taken.