Time+Water+Climate: Thoughts on Three Years of Change

Has our discussion of climate change advanced in recent years? Has the level of attention increased? These questions are not easy to answer. No one takes polls on these issues. How do we see benchmarks of progress — or a lack of progress? I’ve been working on climate and water issues since about 2004, or almost a decade now. My own evolution has been enormous. I think about these issues very differently than I used to, and with luck my changes represent improvement over time. Indeed, my views have gone through several dramatic shifts. That personal evolution is reflected more broadly — many people and many institutions have also shifted significantly over time. Here, I want to compare today with three years ago, between the two most recent World Water Forums.

The World Water Forum occurs every three years. Four weeks ago, the seventh World Water Forum ended in Korea. All seven have occurred in different countries, and many of these meetings have been quite large. The Istanbul Forum — six years ago — reported an attendance around 30,000 for the week. The Marseilles Forum three years ago reported about 20,000. These are big meetings, with very diverse audiences. Many parts of the global water community attend, and many have nothing really in common with each other.

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In 2012 in Marseille, several colleagues organized a major push on climate change and water, with a strong focus on global climate policy and on climate adaptation. These were mostly heavy hitters. People who worked at very high level of political negotiations, often who were tied into senior foreign ministry work in the runup to the Copenhagen UN climate conference in 2010 (COP15). Here's what I wrote at the time. It's a good read still, and I agree with most of it still.

The opening session in France included Connie Hedegard. She was the person who moderated the 190 country plenary debate for the Copenhagen conference as the Danish environment ministry. There were seven other great speakers, almost as famous, all talking about the need to engage on water and climate adaptation issues, particularly at a global and national policy level. It was an impressive set of people on the stage. But there was only one problem:

There was no audience.

About 25 people were in the audience, a number of whom (like myself) were co-organizers. It was very grim, especially in a hall that could easily hold some 200 or more people.

There was nothing wrong with the advertising or the location. The time of day for the session was excellent. But no one came. People were not interested in the topic.

Three years later, I helped organize another session on water and climate. The lineup did not contain very famous people like Connie Hedegaard, but it did contain a lot of people who were practitioners, pushing the boundaries of how you mainstream climate adaptation into water management, investment, natural resource work, capacity building, and global policy. The room could hold 200 people, and about 150 or 200 people were actually there — and stayed there.

Moreover, water and climate issues were everywhere at the Forum. There were a lot of sessions, mostly looking at what we should be doing differently. The number of people engaged on these issues was much larger, more focused, and more sophisticated in our experiences and articulation. And the audiences — the water community — wanted to engage on these very issues.

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