Progress report for
Urgent call to establish a new UN Convention for Conserving River Deltas (UN-CCRD)
Achievement at a glance
Through the leadership of African Centre for Climate Actions and Rural Development Initiative (ACCARD), successfully coordinated the initiative to establish a multidiverse stakeholders’ partnership uniting deltas communities and interest group called DeltasUNite, to engage with and raise awareness on the climate change-induced challenges in major deltas across the World. The considered some of the benefits of having a coordinated local-to-global DeltasUNite platform for deltas communities among others are to discuss as well as find solutions to some of the cascading environmental, social and economic challenges in the deltas. ACCARD has been able to identify key organisations including research institutions, governmental agencies, and local delta communities and those working with major deltas across the globe particularly in the Nigerian Niger Delta, Mekong River Deltas, Indus Deltas, Mississippi delta, Mega delta, Nile delta and the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, as either partners, stakeholders or beneficiaries of the initiative we started at the UN Water conference.ACCARD engaged with fishermen, farmers, and local communities in Africa to discuss the benefit of the proposed United Nations Convention on Conserving River Deltas (UNCCRD). They appreciated the proposed structured of the UNCCRD and call, because it provided them (for the first time) a platform to have their voices heard, actively participate in global discussion as well as find solutions to their peculiar challenges in the deltas. Also, noting the seat local communities and indigenous peoples will occupy in UNCCRD making it different from existing conventions again drew their interest. This multi-stakeholders partnership stakeholders led by African Centre for Climate Actions and Rural Development Initiative were at the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Conference in Dubai (COP28) with large representation from Nigeria, Pakistan, United State of America and Egypt to present the proposed United Nations Convention for Conserving River Deltas (UNCCRD) and it was unveiled on December 4, 2023 Side Event Room 7, Blue Zone from 16:45 – 18:15.
We have continued to hold monthly virtual meetings and hybrid engagements to expand the DeltasUNite network as well as engage with more deltas on the benefits of the community-centred and driven, newly unveiled United Nations Convention on Conserving River Deltas (UNCCRD) when finally operationalised.
We are already planning a UNCCRD Summit in Vietnam housing the Mekong River deltas to deepen the engagement, get more local-to-international support and appeal to the United Nations (UN) to partner more with us and operationalise UNCCRD. We have developed the concept note, identified more partners including governments and have been holding virtual partners meetings to successfully host the summit. We have different committees namely community, technical, scientific and communication setup before COP28 to move the UNCCRD and deltasUNite activities forward. Also, we have been able to draft the text of the proposed convention to be submitted to the United Nations to move forward.
Challenges faced in implementation
The most challenge concern in this engagement is getting the needed resources to engage with more local communities and governments about UNCCRD and DeltasUNite movement. Although, we are making some progress through our existing avenues and partnerships with organisations and governments. There is a need to organise more in-country and local community engagements. These hybrid meetings will help raise awareness on the need for the conservation of deltas, increase the campaign our attitudinal change in our deltas including destructive activities by local communities living in these deltas and from extractive companies, build climate resilient responses in delta communities, increase documentation of some of the challenges and to identified locally-led solutions as well as efforts that can be amplify to mitigate some of the growing challenges. From our engagements, we have observed that there is still little science in most of our deltas, documentation of the rate of disappearing biodiversity and natural resources and their ecological and livelihoods assessments which is leading to forced migrations, hunger, poverty and associated conflicts in delta communities. We are hoping that when UNCCRD is finally operationalised, there should be more academic research and knowledge sharing, especially in some of the deltas with little or no scientific documentation like the Nigerian Niger and Indus deltas.ACCARD and its partners in this initiative strongly believe that indigenous peoples and local communities hold some knowledge with less expensive solutions that can be harnessed to solve most of the challenges in these deltas in the face of climate change and limited global financing.
Also, we are still doing our best to deal with diverse stakeholder’s organisation’s interest, to stay on the big picture of achieving a United Nations Convention for the Conservation of River Deltas, to support local communities and governments of these deltas, rather than personal interests including financial.
Another gap we hope to close is to work more closely with the United Nations (UN) on this initiative in addition to existing official window, to have more personal discussions with the United Nations to as soon as possible operationalise UNCCRD owing to the many benefits it offers inline with the United Nations objectives to promote indigenous peoples and local government inclusion in global discuss, integration of traditional / indigenous knowledge in finding solutions to global problems, deploy available finance to local-to-global problems, get in-country and local community partnership as well as academic solutions.
ACCARD will continue to need the strategic United Nations support, guidance, participation and platforms to drive this initiative.
Next Steps
Freeman Elohor OLUOWOBeneficiaries
Beneficiaries of this initiative will include the United Nations (UN) to reduce the cost of climate change management and the deployment of available financial resources rightly to addressing delta challenges, reduce forced migration, hunger and poverty. It will help the United Nations to achieve the game changing initiative of citizen science and local community participation in global solutions especially as it connects to water and climate change.
Governments of countries will benefit as well, as UNCCRD will help to address some of the social, economic and environmental challenges they face. It will reduce the associated conflict and cost of conflict management by governments of these countries with the awareness to be raise and having them contribute solutions and take ownership to the peculiarities of their problems.
The Science community will benefit because it will help to amplify the need for delta science and documentation as well as recognise some of their existing work including getting more funding to delta research.
The most beneficiaries will the local communities because they will be seating on the same table at the United Nations with their governments both to discuss and find solutions to their worsening delta challenges. Of course, the stakeholders lead by African Centre for Climate Actions and Rural Development Initiative (ACCARD) for achieving a platform and an initiative that benefits one of the often-deprived group of people -- and the local communities with vast indigenous identities.
Actions
We are engaging with local communities within our available resources and manpower to conduct offline and onsite trainings. Encourage the academics to increase research visibility in our deltas. We are talking with governments in countries with deltas to support the UNCCRD. While we will continue with our current training programs and engagements with local communities, we will continue to leverage on available United Nations platform to raise global attention to our initiative, including COP meetings and international conferences to small local community discussions.African Centre for Climate Actions and Rural Development Initiative (ACCARD) we are looking forward to the International Deltas Summit to unveil the UNCCRD convention text / language and call for United Nations to take it over with Governments to operationalise the convention for the many benefits. In conclusion, our action is to continue to engage, train, raise awareness on deltas and hopefully see a fully operationalised United Conservation on Conserving River Deltas (UNCCRD)