High Level Panel: Navigating the Source-to-Sea Journey: Advancing Prosperity Across the Entire Water Cycle

It is increasingly recognized that uncoordinated governance approaches have limited effectiveness in addressing the interlinked triple-planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. Human activities significantly impact and undermine the functioning of freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems and consequently threaten the wellbeing of human societies.

Focusing on integration, source-to-sea management is a game changing holistic approach that bridges sectoral and administrative boundaries, seeking to account for and balance social, environmental, and economic priorities to reap multiple benefits. It does so through highlighting the linkages between land, freshwater, coastal, and marine ecosystems, and bringing together upstream and downstream stakeholders through coordinated governance mechanisms and responses.

While its importance continues to be recognized in the 2023 UN Water Conference, 2022 UN Ocean Conference and 2022 Asia Pacific Water Summit among others, there is a need to accelerate the uptake and implementation of source-to-sea management.

This High-Level Panel represents a unique opportunity to learn how addressing interlinkages across the full land-freshwater-ocean continuum is key to shared prosperity. It explores how source-to-sea action can be accelerated by exchanging experiences from the implementation of holistic approaches at global, national, and sub-national levels in different contexts. Panellists will discuss progress in upstream and downstream collaborative action and explore opportunities to improve coordination in management practices to support sustainability, increase resilience, enhance livelihoods, and realize green and blue economic priorities in source-to-sea systems.

As countries are challenged to meet multiple commitments such as climate mitigation and adaptation, the Global Biodiversity Framework, and the plastics treaty currently under negotiation, source-to-sea management offers a pathway to actions that creates co-benefits across these ambitions. Lessons learned in the Baltic, Asia Pacific and other regions will be showcased and replicable and scalable best practices will be discussed. The High-Level Panel will highlight commitments related to source-to-sea management registered in the Water Action Agenda and during the 2022 UN Ocean Conference and discuss ways to accelerate and expand upon them.

The outcomes of this event are anticipated to lead to revisions or the formulation of new and ongoing commitments to source-to-sea management that will be carried forward to the Stockholm World Water Week 2024, 2025 UN Ocean Conference and the next UN Water Conference in 2026.