BRINGING OUT COMMUNITY VOICES FROM RIVER DELTAS ACROSS AFRICA, ASIA, EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA AND NORTH AMERICA AND A SUMMARY OF SCIENTIFIC ASSESSMENTS OF RISK AND SECURITY CHALLENGES FACING DELTAS
Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security, University of Vermont, Burlington VT, USA
The worsening climate crises underscores the urgent need for accelerated efforts to substantially address the worsening impact of climate change on water resources that are leading to human migration especially among young people, water shortage to poverty, hunger and communal conflicts as well as new disease outbreaks. The river deltas are especially the epicenters of these crises both due to loss of freshwater from highlands and rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion from oceans. The UN can facilitate an international multi stakeholder platform to provide the urgently needed dialogue and transformative action. To be called “United Nations Convention on River Deltas (UN-CCRD)”, this platform will enable urgent action to address the impending future water challenges and looming global crises of food, conflict and freshwater shortage. This is a game changing collaborative solution that will blend indigenous knowledge with science, coordinate government interventions across vertical and horizontal levels as well to enable a global network of community scientists. The UN-CCRD platform will resolve some of the existing and future concerns of the peaceful coexistence of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), South Asian and South-East Asian countries with shared trans-boundary water resources in the future. Also, it will help to mitigate the growing agitations of indigenous peoples and local communities including young people, women and elderly – mostly vulnerable to these cascading impacts.
We have organized a series of events in this backdrop. This first event will focus on bringing out community voices from river deltas across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America and a summary of scientific assessments of risk and security challenges facing deltas.
