Securing Clean Water in Transboundary Indus, Jordan, Mekong and Amazon Basins through Science and Environmental Diplomacy 

In partnership with Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security (IEDS) at University of Vermont and Environmental Peacebuilding Association (ENPAX)

This 3-part symposium will take place on June 8th, June 16th, and June 24th 2021, from 8:30am-10:30am ET. 

Participants in this Road to Geneva symposium will deliberate upon ongoing community-based science and environmental diplomacy approaches to identify cooperative, yet feasible scientific, technological, legal, and policy solutions for securing clean water within and across four transboundary river basins: 

• Indus (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China),

• Jordan (Israel, Palestine, Jordan),

• Mekong (China, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam), and

• Amazon (Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela).

Water shared across political boundaries can be a powerful avenue for peacebuilding. Empowering local communities to conserve ecosystem services and co-design water pollution mitigation solutions can enable sustainable transitions that benefit both people and nature. 

The power of citizen science monitoring and transboundary governance creates a holistic positive feedback effect which can combat Track-1 formal diplomatic inertia in complex transboundary conflict zones. Our theory of change for enabling peace is that Track-2 (scientist to scientist) and Track-3 (community to community) environmental diplomacy can leverage change by capitalizing upon the shared goals to conserve natural resources in conflict-ridden Social Ecological Systems.

The first 2-hour meeting will focus on Track-3 themes pertaining to the state of the citizen/community science monitoring and transboundary governance mechanisms in the focal river basins. 

The second 2-hour meeting will focus on evaluating the current capacity of the basin-wide integrated watershed management models to monitor and predict hydro-climatic extreme events (e.g., floods, droughts) and regimes (e.g., glacial melt rates, poor water quality). The role of AI and satellite data in enabling continuous monitoring and prediction of extreme events will be part of the discussion in this second Track-2 themed meeting. 

The third 2-hour meeting will focus on identifying creative synergies and cooperative solutions for scaling up the implementation of science and environmental diplomacy approaches to secure clean water in conflict-ridden basins. The integration of scientific knowledge with community needs and knowledge will be the focus of this third meeting.

The sessions will be livestreamed to YouTube for those who plan to view the events. After pre-registering, further instructions on accessing the YouTube livestream and/or the Zoom meeting will follow as appropriate.

To enable participation across different global time zones, these meetings will take place from 8:30 am to 10:30 am US Eastern Time on three days in June:

(1) Tuesday June 8th, 8:30 am to 10:30 am EST

(2) Wednesday June 16th, 8:30 am to 10:30 am EST

(3) Thursday June 24th, 8:30 am to 10:30 am EST

For more information, please contact  Dr. Asim Zia, Professor of Public Policy and Computer Science; Director, Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security, University of Vermont, 146 University Place, Burlington VT 05405 USA. Email: Asim.Zia@uvm.edu. 

You can review the ENPAX conversation with him, last October, in the Interview with Member Series here.