In June 1972, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm jump-started global mobilisation for environmental issues. Fifty years later, the UN’s Stockholm+50 Conference will discuss how to achieve a sustainable and inclusive future for all. Water Alignment, as a vehicle for coordination and impact, will be featured during a side event as a transformational approach for nature, climate, and a sustainable future.
The side event ‘Water alignment: to enable innovation and finance for a climate-resilient future’ is organized by GWP, the Governments of The Netherlands, Sweden, Tajikistan, and Germany, UNEP-DHI, and the Environmental Defence Fund. It will run from 9.30am to 10.45am on 2 June 2022. Conference participants will be able to attend in person, and the event will be livestreamed.
The event will promote water alignment as a framework for cooperation to accelerate progress towards protecting ecosystems, mitigating climate change, and ensuring a healthy and resilient world for future generations, where water drives alignment vertically and horizontally. Water alignment makes progress possible by bringing together policy aims, businesses decisions, and citizen actions – ensuring that high-level policymakers and resource managers and stakeholders across different sectors are all ‘pulling the rope in the same direction’, while staying anchored in key ongoing global initiatives and processes.
Water alignment means taking a collaborative approach – one that allows for better harmony between those who aim to achieve global targets and those who make decisions on the actions and investments needed to reach those targets, and one that allows stakeholders from different sectors and governance levels to work together. Building on the key role of water for climate resilience and for nature’s health, it positions water as an enabler for ambitious transformational change towards a sustainable future. In this way, it enables innovation and financing to drive forward new approaches to water management.
The session will showcase a new way of working – one where governments, civil society, private companies and investors, youth, and marginalised groups work together to create sustainable solutions to climate and environmental challenges. It will draw on experiences from different actors, including governments, youth activists, a UN agency, and others, with GWP facilitating dialogue. The event will advocate for systems thinking and water alignment for achieving aims set out in the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Decade of Action for the Sustainable Development Goals.
Speakers at the event are as follows:
|
Moderator |
Darko Manakovski, Head of Global Development, Global Water Partnership |
|
Panellist 1 |
Kitty van der Heijden, Director General for International Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands |
|
Panellist 2 |
Dr. Claudia Hiepe, Interim Head of Division for Environmental policy, biodiversity, forests, marine conservation, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany |
|
Panellist 3 |
Shreya Ramachandran, Stockholm+50 Youth Task Force |
|
Panellist 4 |
Tom Grasso, Senior Vice President, Climate Resilient Food Systems, Environmental Defense Fund, USA |
|
Panellist 5 |
Cecilia Scharp, Assistant Director General, Sida |
|
Panellist 6 |
Karin Kronhöffer, Director Strategy and Communications, Swedfund |
|
Video message |
Joakim Harlin, Head of Freshwater Ecosystems Unit, UNEP, and Head of UNEP-DHI Centre on Water and Environment |
|
Video message |
Sulton Rahimzoda, Co-chair of the Dushanbe Water Process, Government of Tajikistan |
How to join
Join the livestream of this event in our Facebook page. Follow this link for more Stockholm+50 side event information.