News.Jun 01, 2015

S2S Platform at World Water Congress 2015: The salty dimension of water governance

The World Water Congress Special Session on the “Salty dimension on water governance – the link between upstream management and downstream impacts” examined barriers to and opportunities for managing resources with a “source to sea” perspective, recognizing the linkages between land, freshwater, coasts and marine areas.

The session was organized by the Action Platform on Source to Sea Management including presentations on the work of Marine Scotland, UNEP-GPA, IUCN’s Ridge to Reef initiative and UNESCO’s MedPartnership work on coastal aquifers, followed by a panel discussion. The session reaffirmed the need to recognize multiple uses and trade-offs in the source to sea continuum and to learn from examples of benefit sharing between different zones, recognizing the importance of understanding the different systems from source to sea to better manage the connections and the challenges posed by the division of institutional responsibilities in source to sea contexts.