Global and Transboundary

Hopefully within the next three years, 11 remaining countries will ratify the UN Watercourses Convention at which point, a global convention would be in force that specifically covers transboundary watercourses according to international law. A Secretariat would then need to be set up to promote and facilitate the implementation of the Convention, which would take a minimum of two years due to the need to gather sufficient medium-term funding and arranging co-locations of the Convention with existing international agencies like UN Water, UNEP, or others, before full implementation could start. As a logical consequence, until 2017 at the earliest, the prevailing instruments for transboundary water management will be the existing agreements for 105 of the 263 international waters and the Espoo Convention and UNECE Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes (limited to Europe and Central Asia; in addition to the US for Espoo and the Russian Federation for the UNECE Watercourses Convention). As the majority of these countries are European Commission member states, the governing legal document for them is in any case the EU Water Framework Directive rather than the Espoo and UNECE Conventions.

 

Considering the growing pressures on water resources, transboundary watercourses will continue to experience more infrastructure development and regulation and changes to flow regimes where other basin states have limited information and influence, no formal international legal arrangement to refer to, and would solely rely on diplomatic dialogues at the political level. Even with a Global Convention in force, transboundary agreements in place, and functioning river commissions, the challenge will remain that they are respected in regards to procedures of notification and negotiation.