Acceleration for ambient water quality action – A UN Systems Approach

Background: Currently, several challenges prevent the UN’s ambient water quality -related programmes and agencies (UNEP, WMO and UNESCO) from supporting UN Member States more effectively in accelerating their action to improve water quality: • There are many points of contact in the mandates and programmatic activities of these organizations, resulting in possible synergies whose potential has not yet been fully realized. UNEP GEMS/Water, UNESCO IHP (IIWQ) and the WMO in its Action Plan for Hydrology work with different networks, national focal points and partners to improve monitoring, assessment and management of freshwater quality. This can be converted into an important catalyst of synergies, noting that joint actions have already started. • There is no mature process in place among the different UN entities to align their work in the field of water quality and to act as a single, coherent UN movement and as a point of reference for Member States. Within UN-Water, these programmes such as UNEP GEMS/Water and more recently established action networks such as the World Water Quality Alliance (WWQA), and the UNESCO IIWQ have improved our knowledge regarding the status and latest trends in global water quality. The Water and Climate Coalition, WCC, convened by WMO addresses aspects of water quality within the context of climate change and drivers. However, too little has been achieved to reverse the widespread deterioration of freshwater resources from pollution, ecosystem degradation and climate change. These shortfalls can be traced back to a considerable degree, to the present limitation of water quality data in addition to capacity deficits. This initiative presents promising collaborative pathways aimed at enhancing the UN’s water quality architecture in order to accelerate action toward improving water quality. By identifying synergies, gaps, and overlaps in mandates, the new partnership-based architecture would be designed to streamline activities and increase the efficiency of interventions by fostering mutual support, coherence and collaboration between existing UN assets, communities of practice and partners across society. Objective: A multilateral mechanism at the UN level coordinates the continuous monitoring, reporting, and assessment of global freshwater quality – feeding into critical assessments such as UNEPs World Water Quality Assessment and the Global Water Assessment (Proposed by UNESCO). It supports UN Member States in building and maintaining their freshwater quality monitoring, reporting, assessment and management capacities, complementary to similar existing mechanisms for water quantity (e.g. WHO WHOS and HydroSOS). It provides a coherent infrastructure for collecting data and information through the promotion and advancement of interoperability and common water quality metadata requirements whilst enabling sharing within the respective mandates of parties.