UN Water

UN-Water is composed of representatives of 28 United Nations organizations. United Nations organizations include those responsible for major funds and programs, specialised agencies, regional commissions, United Nations conventions and other entities within the UN system. Other organizations outside of the United Nations are partners in UN-Water.

The establishment of a UN-Water Task Force on Water and Climate Change was proposed in 2008 aiming to offer ‘an opportunity to further discuss climate change and water linkages in their widest sense and to ensure that the UN-System in general, and UN-Water in particular, is better prepared to meet further challenges and play an essential role in this area. A Task Force could also serve the function of further elaboration on how the UN System, through increased interaction and coherence by strengthening a mechanism such as the UN-Water, could play a more proactive and constructive role in the formulation and implementation of relevant adaptation and mitigation strategies’.

Its first round of activities completed in 2009 brought to evidence that the idea of establishing a coordination mechanism to address the issues related to water and climate change was indeed filling in a gap. On the other hand, it has also become clear that climate change issues will continue to be at the forefront of UN-Water concerns for several years, if not decades, and that in order to respond to the challenges they pose, a long-standing coordination mechanism would be more adequate than the one initially proposed. Hence, as per the decision of the UN-Water meeting in January 2010, the Task Force on Water and Climate Change was transformed into the Water and Climate Change Thematic Priority Area (WCC-TPA).

The core objective of the WCC-TPA is to strengthen UN System coordination on activities related to water and climate change in order to facilitate assessment by Member countries of the impacts of climate change on water and adoption (by these) of strategies for meeting the challenges of climate change both for adaptation and mitigation in the related water sub-sectors.