Why this session matters to us
Water is the one thing every environmental treaty depends on and none was written around. The three Rio Conventions born at the 1992 Earth Summit, on climate (UNFCCC), biodiversity (CBD) and desertification (UNCCD), each run on water, and each negotiates, reports and counts on its own separate track. This side event, co-hosted by the Netherlands and SIWI a week before the HLPF ministerial segment and five months before the UN Water Conference in Abu Dhabi (8 to 10 December 2026), asked whether water could be the thing that finally ties the three together.
For us the question underneath was narrower and sharper. Can water be measured coherently across three conventions and SDG 6, or does each framework keep its own partial count of the same rivers? The most honest thing the room admitted is that the counting is not yet shared, and that closing the gap is at least as much a statistical problem as a political one.
Three conventions, three rooms, one substance
Brazil put the fragmentation most plainly. Speaking for the national water agency (ANA), its superintendent for hydrological studies traced thirty-five years back to Rio 1992 and drew the lesson that matters for anyone trying to measure progress.
Japan’s panellist, a veteran of the UN water process now at GRIPS, argued the disconnection starts at the top: leaders do not register that the three conventions share an origin, “let alone that they are deeply connected by water.” His proposed fix is a single organising idea. Everything the conventions worry about, he said, reduces to the same hydrological variable.
On that logic he pressed for a new international water framework that would let water sit “shoulder to shoulder” with the three conventions, citing the precedent of how water was folded into disaster risk reduction over the past two decades. It is a tidy proposition, and it drew the session’s one real dissent. Ethiopia’s Permanent Representative accepted the premise, quoting the event’s own concept note that water is “an integrating element across climate, biodiversity, and the land agenda,” then warned against the cure.
That is the actual fault line under a friendly panel. Integrate by building something new that gives water its own count, or integrate inside the frameworks that already exist and under-deliver. Both positions are, at bottom, arguments about who gets to count water and against which baseline.
The data gap nobody in the room could argue with
Where speakers disagreed on architecture, they converged on diagnosis: the numbers that would prove water connects the conventions largely do not exist in comparable form. FAO put the sharpest figure on it. Of the 114 countries that wrote national food-security pathways after the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit, its land-and-water director said, two thirds are “water blind.” Agriculture is the largest water user on the planet, and most national plans for it cannot see water at all.
Brazil made the more granular measurement point, and it is the one closest to how SDG 6 is actually scored. Its water agency has started reading below the national average, where the headline numbers stop being true.
Disaggregated by municipality, river basin, informal settlement, race and Indigenous or Quilombola community, the country’s low average water stress dissolves into regions running far higher, and into populations where fewer than half of Indigenous people have a private bathroom. That is the case for finer-grained water data made concretely: an average that says “fine” over a place that is not. Finland added the international corollary, that “more integrated, consistent, comparable data” is what different treaty processes still lack, and flagged that even the UNCCD’s remotely sensed drought data has real limits of accuracy and representativeness. The moderator named the obvious job for the UN in all this: standardising the definitions and methodologies so that everyone is working from the same indicators. And Brazil, tellingly, closed on the measurement question that comes next: where does the world go after the SDG 6 targets expire in 2030.
The count that would actually move money
The Secretary of the UNECE Water Convention supplied the session’s most useful admission about why better water numbers matter, and it is a finance argument. Water, she noted, is still not an official agenda item at the climate COPs the way oceans, agriculture and even mountains now are; it advances through a voluntary vehicle, the Baku Dialogue on Water for Climate Action, endorsed by more than seventy countries. But she was candid that the water sector has partly done this to itself, by failing to put its own work in the units that unlock climate finance.
The reframe she urged is one we heard echoed all afternoon: stop presenting water as a casualty of climate change and start counting it as an asset that reduces the bill.
The instrumentation to make that case is starting to appear. UNEP is preparing a set of drought resilience indicators for launch at the UNCCD COP, and the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Water framed the whole shift as one of accounting: treat water “as investment” across climate, biodiversity and land management rather than as an additional burden, and the political silos get easier to break.
Our read
The revelation of this session is that integration is a counting problem before it is a political one, and the counting problem is unglamorous. Everyone in the room agreed water connects the three conventions. Nobody could point to a shared indicator set that proves it, or to a single figure that reconciles a country’s climate, biodiversity and land-degradation reporting on the same river. The two roads out on the table point in opposite directions, Japan’s new water framework and Ethiopia’s warning not to build another mechanism atop the ones already missing their marks, and both are really disputes about who counts water and against what baseline.
The moderator’s own summary is the uncomfortable part: “integration is easier at the local level than at the national level than at the global level.” The scale at which water is genuinely managed, the basin and the city, is the scale at which it is least counted in common terms. Until a country’s water data reconciles across its three convention scorecards and its SDG 6 returns, “water at the heart of the Rio Conventions” is a slogan the numbers cannot yet back. Watch whether the December Water Conference produces an actual shared metric, or one more framework that counts water beautifully and alone.
Why it matters for the SDGs
This is a SDG 6 story first, and specifically a story about how SDG 6 is measured against everything around it. Water is also the delivery mechanism for the Rio-linked goals, SDG 13 (climate), SDG 15 (land, desertification and terrestrial biodiversity) and SDG 14 (oceans, which Ireland pulled into the frame through the land-sea nexus), while the coherence and data problem lands squarely on SDG 17. The practical stake is simple. If water stays counted three different ways by three conventions, the SDG 6 dashboard and the convention scorecards will keep disagreeing about the same water, and no amount of political commitment to “synergy” will close a gap that is, underneath, a gap in measurement.
Watch & read
- SIWI at HLPF 2026, the convening organisation’s listing for this Netherlands co-hosted side event (Conference Room 12, 7 July 2026).
- 2026 UN Water Conference, Abu Dhabi, 8 to 10 December 2026, co-hosted by the United Arab Emirates and Senegal, where the Interactive Dialogues referenced here (including “Water for Planet”) will report.
- The Baku Dialogue on Water for Climate Action (IISD Earth Negotiations Bulletin), the COP-to-COP vehicle for getting water into climate action.
- SDGCounting on the same water thread at HLPF 2026: SDG 6 is well counted, and six to eight times too slow · the opening and the SDG 6 review · launching the Global WASH Sector Resilience Index.
- Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Speakers are named where a role could be verified and cited by role or country otherwise; figures are as speakers reported them and were not independently verified.