 Hello everyone, good morning, good afternoon and good evening depending upon which part of the world you are joining us from. Welcome to the 48th webinar by the Water Channel which is also the 4th webinar that we are co-organizing with HIE Delft. This is 2018 and we have spent I think the last 20 years hearing again and again from several quarters that the next big war will be fought on water. The premise of this idea is quite straightforward and it is quite convincing. Water is an essential commodity, water is becoming increasingly scarce, some of the largest freshwater sources in the world are shared by nations and provinces, so this scarcity will lead to conflict. However, in the last 20 years we have also seen examples and cases which sort of disprove this premise. For example Pakistan and India are two big nuclear arm nations who have had a stormy relationship to say the least, however they share the waters of their trans-boundary rivers quite peacefully, sharing of the waters has not really been one of the bones of contention between the two nations who fight about just about everything else. If you have followed the works of the speakers of today's webinar and I have, you will be familiar with the idea that the probability of conflict depends upon so much more than scarcity. It is about geography, it is about hydrogeology, it is about change. And the capacity of institutions on the different sides to absorb the change. This is 2018, nuance is not the flavor of the season so I am thankful to Aaron Wolff and Zaki Schuber for joining this webinar to add nuance and layers and substance and rigor to this particular discussion on water cooperation and diplomacy, which is usually as I said dominated by headlines like the next big war will be fought around water. So Aaron Wolff our first speaker is a professor at the Oregon State University and visiting professor in water diplomacy at the IHC Delft. His research focuses on issues relating trans-boundary water resources to conflict and cooperation. He is a trained mediator and facilitator, directs the program in water conflict management and transformation through which he has offered workshops, facilitations and mediation in shared river basins throughout the world. Zaki Schuber teaches law and water diplomacy at IHC Delft. She is a lawyer by training and so holds a very unique perspective on this topic. We look forward to hearing from her especially perhaps what is international law, what incentives do sovereign nations have to abide by international law and how this diplomacy around shared international waters actually works. You would have already seen the detailed bios of the speakers on the homepage of the webinar from which you came here. So I will shortly hand over the proceedings to them. But before that some housekeeping. This is an interactive webinar. So we would like you to ask questions, share comments and disagree with the speakers. You can do that through this chat window on the right hand of the screen, which you have seen I think many of you. We also request you to type into the chat box as some of you have been doing. Your name, the name of your institution and your field of work. So we have a sense of who is the audience, who we are talking to. So without further ado, I would like to hand over the proceedings to the speakers. Starting with Zaki. Aaron. Aaron. Thanks so much for that really kind introduction. It's a real pleasure to be here and I should note I'm not just here for the day. I've had the pleasure of being a guest here at IHE as a visiting scholar for six months which to my dismay seems to be coming to an end in about three weeks. So thanks for hosting the water channel and also IHE Delft. So we start with the basic premises of the problem, if you will. We have two images here of how people look at water. On the left is the way I think water people tend to see the world. We see the world through watersheds. The only boundaries that we see are the boundaries of the watershed or the catchment area. Everything within this unit is connected, surface water, groundwater, quality and quantity. And on the right is the real world that everybody else sees, the boundaries that divide us, the boundaries between sectors, between nations, between states within countries. And the problem generally is that we need to manage water resources as if the world looked the way we see it on the left, recognizing the very legitimate reason for those boundaries on the right. And when we put those two together in this kind introduction we heard a couple of case studies that people have pointed to, the Jordan basin that's shared between Israelis and Arabs, the Tigris and Euphrates between Turkey and Syria and Iraq, the Aral basin where tensions between upstream riparians who'd like to build dams and downstream riparians who need the water for agriculture, and of course the Nile basin where there are eleven countries that all share the watershed. And people have noticed that in places like this where there's a certain amount of tension and water is shared, and as we heard there were a number of proclamations especially at the end of the 1990s, the early 2000s, basically summarized by this quote by Kofi Annan, fierce competition for fresh water may well become a source of conflict and wars in the future. And this is about the time that I first got involved and as a scientist I'm trained originally as a hydrogeologist and the initial question that a scientist would ask when somebody proclaims the future warfare is what do we know? What are the assumptions that land us to such dramatic conclusions? And the kinds of things that we didn't know at the time were the most fundamental sets of data. For example, we didn't know how many international basins there were. We had heard an awful lot about those six. It turns out when we sat down to count them that there are actually 310 transboundary watersheds. It's about half the land surface of the earth, a little less than half the world's population, and almost 80% of the world's freshwater originates within this basin. We also didn't even think about an entire spectrum of things that countries might do. We had heard about the conflict potential in these six basins, but there's an entire spectrum that you see at the bottom of your screen of things that countries might do with each other. They may well conflict, as we had heard in the news, or they may cooperate, or they may do nothing. So the larger question we had was a more holistic question. We had heard something anecdotal evidence from these six basins, what's happening in the rest of the world, and what's happening more holistically along a spectrum from conflict to cooperation. We have here in the same building as IHE, we share with IGRAC, so we would be remiss if we also didn't notice that there are some 600 shared aquifers around the world, creating probably the future areas where tensions may well arise. So one of the things that we tried to do at Oregon, and often in cooperation with our collaborators here at IHE, was simply to count things. We tried to count the world's watersheds. We worked with IGRAC on the shared groundwater. We compiled a number of treaties and laws and case studies trying to get this more holistic question answered what's happening in the world as a whole. One of the things that we did was go back and look over a 60-year period to identify every reported interaction between two countries and placed it along that spectrum from conflict to cooperation. We ended up with 1,800 events over 60 years, and simply by doing that, we got a little bit more nuanced understanding of what the issues actually are. So here are those 1,800 events across a spectrum from cooperation to conflict. And what you notice right off the bat is that the two thirds of the time that we do anything over water, it's to cooperate. That's all of this blue area here. If we look at the conflict side, almost 80% of conflict is this minus one and minus two. This is one of two things happening. This is either a politician saying we'll go to war over the lifeblood of the nation, or it's being reported by a journalist that there's going to be conflict. And so in terms of actual violence, we're really looking at these few cases here, 38 cases over 60 years that are reported of violence and it's small scale violence. It does not escalate into a war in any of these cases. In fact, if we look at that minus seven, it turns out that there are zero wars not now and not throughout history in terms of a cross-border warfare specifically over water resources. This relationship about two thirds of the time doing anything about water tends to hold no matter what scale or no matter where we are in the world. So this is the state of Oregon where I'm from, the Western United States globally around the world. When we tend to interact over water, two thirds of the time it's cooperatively. The other question we were faced with is what does cause tension? Even if it doesn't cause violence, we understand fully that water causes tremendous tension. And if we're not managing water cooperatively, we're not managing water efficiently. So we really need to understand where the political tensions are going to be and of course the natural assumption is that conflict is caused by scarcity. It feels intuitively right but we also thought of what other stressors might be. Climate is a population growth, is at the level of development and so we crafted again another research project where we compiled all of this information, the possible indicators of water conflict into a geographic information system. There's a hundred layers of data and it was 60 years long because the data changes every year and once we put the data in place the indicator should jump out and absolutely nothing jumps out. It turns out that we see every indicator is statistical garbage, basically, statistically nothing indicates anything about anything anywhere. So this presents a problem until we start to look more closely at the data. Every single indicator did not indicate conflict but there were pairs of indicators that did. So if we think about what happens in a basin there are two sides. On the one hand there's all the change that's going on in the basin. People wanting to build things, populations going up, environment being degraded, economies going up and on the other side is the institutional capacity that people develop in order to manage that level of change and so when we have change in a basin it's mitigated by the institutional capacity to absorb the change and if you have strong institutions you're able to deal with much more change. So scarcity by itself or dams by themselves don't cause conflict as long as we have robust institutions, good treaties, good relations, good history of working together that can mitigate. So what we find now is we have this working hypothesis, the likelihood of conflict rises as the rate of change within a basin exceeds the institutional capacity to absorb the change. The indicators we see unilateral development, in other words one country building something in the absence of an agreement about what to do about it. We have internationalized basins where the institutions were crafted under one government or an empire, the British empire, the Soviet Union and that institutional capacity breaks apart or general animosity. So now we can really identify basins that may be at risk in the future and we recognize now the relationship between data that scientists want and the political questions that people tend to ask. So if we look at most basins what the scientists will often ask is how do I get more data? If only I could get a very detailed model, the politicians will suddenly do the right thing. This is the southeast United States. There were two basins where, as in a lot of basins, there's upstream development and the downstream states are concerned about the upstream development. And at some point in the negotiations, the negotiators recognized that water needed to be preserved for the Delta regions, for the coastal regions, for the fishing and the environment. And they turned to the scientists and they said, we understand that you need water. How much water do you need? And of course for a scientist that's a very scary question. Well, we need a 10-year baseline study and another 10 years to figure out the impacts of change. So if you don't have that, tell us your gut. Tell us what you feel having worked your entire life in this basin and then we can adapt the management over time. So this now is what we're hoping to do is to balance the desires of the scientists always for more data, for better models, and the needs of the politicians for very quick answers, even if it's a best guess. Understanding this relationship, we now can map what we call basins at risk. This is our first map, 2003. And I would argue that many of these basins are no longer at risk anymore. But we try and update this when we can and work. And again, between Oregon State and IHE and a number of other partners, in order to get a very nuanced look at the dynamics in the basins of the world, to try and help understand where the basins at risk are going to be precisely so that we can help build the institutional capacity needed to adapt to the change. So thank you very much, Aaron, for sharing with us these insights into what's been happening and what's happening now. And I think it's time to turn to two concepts, the idea of water cooperation and water diplomacy. So as you've said, we see increasing competition over water for a variety of reasons. There are many, and we don't necessarily want to look for one in particular. But what we see is that this competition is happening, and it's happening at all levels. We make a distinction between water cooperation and water diplomacy. The ideas are the same. But we make a difference in terms of the levels at which the competition is happening. Now, before I go more into that, I just wanted to say that we're starting to see that a number of international institutions are noting issues around water. We see that the World Economic Forum in its yearly report has identified water crises as a top global risk for a number of years. The UN Security Council itself has also looked at the issue and the Secretary General has also made some statements in relation to water cooperation, water resources management. And we're starting to read more and more in the media about water conflicts, whether it's water wars, strong words, in relation to the Nile, as some of you may have seen on the BBC News website, or competition at a more local level. We see increasingly local communities facing increased competition, different sectors, different groups that are competing more and more. And this is really starting to emerge from the water sector. What we've been talking about has been noticed by the professionals involved in the sector. But what we're seeing increasingly is that a wider audience is becoming aware of these issues and is starting to get concerned about them. So where do water cooperation and water diplomacy come to be? So we identify first competition or a conflict, perhaps more than just competition, but this agreement, strongest agreements, about water resources, whether it's access to them or availability of them or other types of conflicts between different water uses. And there we can start to think about water cooperation and diplomacy as a means of achieving conflict prevention, conflict management, and conflict transformation as well. So moving from a situation where we have a conflict to a situation where we're dealing with the issue or preventing it, the idea being that ultimately we're trying to achieve a degree of water security for all users. So as I said earlier, the issue of water and this increased competition of whether it's a real competition or perceived competition over interests, whether it's due to weak institutions dealing with water resources management or whatever it is, the water sector has been aware of them. I have to say here that water disputes are not a recent phenomenon. Historically, we're aware that disputes date from the time from which humankind has been accessing water. But what's different is the fact that now it's really starting to affect much larger populations, much broader audience is aware of these. And so we're starting to see more involvement from different sectors, from different groups who are concerned about these. And there are means and mechanisms that are available to deal with these issues. So really water cooperation, water diplomacy is putting together the knowledge about water and using existing dispute settlement or dispute prevention mechanisms and that's where we're starting to see more interest in the concept, the idea of water cooperation and water diplomacy. So what also makes a big difference nowadays is particularly in terms of diplomacy. So if we think of diplomacy in the narrow sense, we'll think of interstate relationships and interstate interactions. Whereas with regard to water cooperation, we think more of the other levels that are generally within a domestic jurisdiction. But when you think of water diplomacy and water cooperation, we realize also we water people that water is one issue amongst many others that decision makers, policy makers, politicians have to deal with. So we come from the water sector. We see water as the most important thing and what everyone needs to focus on. But that goes hand in hand with the other sectors that water relates to, whether it's agriculture, food production, energy production, transport, and many other issues. Water we realize is one of these elements. And so what we're starting to see is an understanding of the role of water within that bigger picture of state interactions and also within the bigger picture of interactions between water users. Historically, there's been a tendency for fragmentation within the water sector itself. We see water resources management developing in relation to irrigation, developing in relation to energy production, developing also in relation to navigation on fresh water. And for a long time, these different sectors were able to operate independently of each other. But there has come a point in time where this is no longer possible. Water quality issues affect water quantity, water availability, navigation and the pollution that navigation may cause has an impact on downstream users who then are using the polluted water. So all of these different users are now coming together and that competition is increasing. And those who are benefiting from these areas are starting to see that they need to understand better water and water issues. So we have really now a much bigger picture and we need to be able to place water within that picture. Now, what's interesting also, we've made a distinction between water cooperation and water diplomacy as a lawyer for me that relates to the normative frameworks that operate at the international level and those that operate at the domestic level. Having said that, the distinction is an arbitrary one. Why do I say that? I think it's quite obvious that when infrastructure is built in an upstream country, for instance, the infrastructure will have both an impact on local population, there may be a need to move local population, there may be a need to change the environment, and so there will be an impact locally. At the same time, it's very likely that there will be an impact downstream as well. Infrastructure, like very large downs, affect the flow of water courses. And in that sense, if the water course is a transboundary one, downstream countries may be affected by the reduction of flow. So an issue that has both local impacts may also have impacts at the international level. And vice versa, decisions that are made internationally between states may also lead to events that have immediate effects on local population. So the picture is one of interconnections between all levels. So finally, a definition we've been going around the theme itself, but really what we see is that water cooperation and water diplomacy are about the interactions between stakeholders and here all relevant stakeholders in relation to transboundary and shared waters, whether international or domestic, to enhance and entrench cooperation as well as to resolve potential or actual conflicts around water. I think what we've seen is that there is significant cooperation. Also, Aaron mentioned earlier that there's more cooperation than conflict around shared waters, but there's a need to continue to increase that cooperation. To go back to the law, we see that approximately 60% of all basins, transboundary international basins, don't have the benefit of an agreement between the different riparians. And from the existing 40%, a number of them don't address all the issues that basins are facing. So there's a need to continue to work on improving and entrenching cooperation. So there are really a range of mechanisms that are available to deal with potential conflicts and actual conflicts with a view to overcoming these conflicts and reaching more cooperation and water security. Very quickly, there are two types of mechanisms, diplomatic ones, legal ones. The diplomatic ones are the ones that are used more commonly, direct negotiations between riparians or users. Assisted negotiations where an impartial third party comes in and helps the riparians or water users define and overcome, discuss and overcome the issue at hand. And where these means are not successful, very often there's a possibility of turning to adjudication or arbitration and handing over the issue for a resolution by an impartial third party, either chosen by the parties in the case of arbitration or imposed in the case of adjudication. So range of means available. The one that I haven't really discussed in detail is the normative frameworks and the legal arrangements that are already in place internationally. We have two conventions at the international level, the 1997 Convention on the Non-Navigational Uses of International Water Courses and the 1992 Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Water Courses and International Lakes. These are universal instruments that apply to the signatories of these instruments. In the case of the 1997 Convention 36 countries, in the case of the other Convention 42 countries, some of the provisions that they contain are considered to be of a customary nature, so applying to all states around the world. So there are incentives, legal incentives for states to cooperate and to share reasonably and equitably the water resources that straddle their borders. Having said that, not all riparian states have either entered into the conventions, these conventions, or treaties at the level of the basin. So I think as a lawyer, I see the value in having documents that crystallize and entrench the way in which states want to jointly manage bodies, water bodies. Having said that, getting states to agree to these agreements and conventions is where diplomatic means and water diplomacy has a role to play. Aaron. Thanks, Jackie. So basically, we understand what water cooperation and diplomacy is. We understand what it's not. It's not just about scarcity. It's not just about international. It's at all scales and at all levels. And we understand that the skills that are brought to bear, not necessarily ones that most water professionals have. We need to think about process. We need to think about institutions. We need to think about relationships. And in the courses that I offer, certainly one of the central skills in water diplomacy is simply to listen, to learn to listen to the other side for a very particular reason. This structure that you see here comes from traditions around the world, where they see that all of us at all scales have four basic sets of needs, our physical needs, emotional, perceptual needs, and spiritual needs. And what often happens in water resources, and those of you alums from IHE, will recognize these tensions from quite a lot of cross-cultural communication in water as well. Oftentimes in water in the West, we focus on physical water, the amount of water, or the perceptual, the intellectual water. We think about how much it costs or where it should be allocated most efficiently, when actually the conflict is more either around emotional water, water as a manifestation of a difficult relationship between two countries, or spiritual water, which often in the West isn't raised in the discussion at all. And so recognizing that water dialogue needs to be able to address all of these different kinds of waters is one of the directions that we're hoping to take this idea of training in water cooperation and diplomacy. We look also at local methods for conflict resolution, for inspiration, for example, as a sulcha from the Middle East, a ceremony of forgiveness, where we're balancing the needs of the individual with the needs of the group, and this wonderful concept, our Dean Resolution of a Conflict that involves no humiliation, is exactly the kind of approach that we're hoping to take. And a lot of countries that have nominally moved beyond these types of approaches are rediscovering them and relearning how important it is for stakeholders to be heard at all different scales. So in Singapore, for example, they're reliving this kampung spirit, the idea that community values can be brought into a discussion even as they start to live in apartment blocks for vertical living. This is the skills that we're trying to bring into our processes. We're really trying to capture from all over the world and from many, many local and spiritual traditions, including recognizing mythic stories, reframing, using principles to give comfort for progress, and this idea of really thinking about what dialogue means, hearing for the shared values that we have. We don't have time to go into a lot of that here, but I will mention that finally, after some 12 years of thinking and writing and asking questions of communities around the world, this is available now in a book. And it's written for precisely this audience. It's written for people who work in conflict at all different scales. It's a how-to with skills, with exercises, and hopefully this may be of some use to those of us who are working in the field in conflict resolution. And so very briefly, we wanted to share also with you what we're doing here in terms of teaching and educational programs. What we've been saying is really a very general overview, and I'm sure many of you would be interested to know more. So we have a couple of master programs, one of which we run jointly with Argan State University and the University for Peace. There's a certificate for those of you who don't have the luxury of spending time doing a master's program. We also have short courses, three-week courses, online courses, even shorter than that, and of course tailor-made courses also for those who want something very specific. So finally, we have, representing our OSU-IHE collaboration, we end with two quotes. One Dutch quote from Morges Benoso. Peace is not an absence of war. It is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. And in America and Buenos Aires, if there is magic on this planet, it's contained in water. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, Zaki and Aaron. We have a few questions, and let's begin with them in a second. So we have a question from Tolu Orekoya, who asks, would you give us real-life examples of where there is ongoing conflict and suggestions as to how they are being resolved or not? Yeah, would you like to take them? Well, I think I would say there are many conflicts, so I want to be very general here and to say there are ongoing conflicts, and some of them have been resolved. Examples of ongoing conflicts, at the moment, one of our students is doing research on conflicts between pastoralists and farmers in the mouth of a river in Africa and trying to understand what is really causing the conflict. It's expressed through access to water, but my student feels that there are more elements that relate to the conflict. Cultural elements, historical elements, socioeconomic factors as well that are at play. And at the moment, this particular conflict has been settled. The violence has ended between the different groups. Having said that, the more structural or the root causes have not been addressed yet, the institutional changes that would help both parties enhance their access to water and reduce conflicts is not yet happening. I'd say internationally, the ones that capture the headlines, the Nile, of course, the Ethiopia is building a large dam, and there have been some stresses between Ethiopia and downstream, especially Egypt. There's quite a lot of ongoing dialogue over that. The Aral basin is one, again, upstream countries are building hydropower facilities, and downstream countries are very concerned. They rely on timing of the water for irrigation during the irrigation season. Almost anywhere in Southeast Asia, most of the major rivers in South and Southeast Asia originate in China. China, of course, has a growing energy demand, which often has a hydropower basis, sometimes concerning the downstream countries. In all of these places, we should mention there's ongoing dialogue precisely to address not only the specific issues, but the larger issues around upstream downstream relations in a way that recognizes that benefits really can be grown and shared if the water is managed cooperatively. If I can quickly add also, to say that we don't have either conflict or cooperation, I think remembering the work of Dr. Nahomi Romachi at King's College, she's identified that you can have both conflict and cooperation happening at the same time, whether in relation to water or other issues as well. And of course, it's a continuum, and you might have a conflict at some point in time that's settled, and then it might reappear later on. If we're talking, for instance, about water availability, availability is not something that's stable. It changes over time, and so a situation that might be settled at a particular point in time may come back later on if for hydrological reasons, for instance, there's less water available. So the issue really nowadays is the ability to deal with these variations, with this instability in relation to water and beyond water in order to continue to ensure access to water. This is a good time to put forward the question by Hala who would like you to elaborate upon the water conflict in River Nile that BBC has broadcast recently and how the international law can play a role in solving this issue. So international water law has been developing for a number of years, and the underlying assumption here is that water is a resource that is shared by the world and we have water that doesn't recognize boundaries and will go from one country to another, cross borders without realizing it. And having acknowledged that, the international community through the 1997 Convention and the 1992 Convention, also a universal instrument, has said that essentially all countries have the right to use shared waters equitably and reasonably. So we have a very general principle, but a very strong one at the same time to guide states in their interactions regarding shared water bodies. There's a second principle, which is the principle of no significant harm. So states cannot cause significant harm to other states through their activities around shared water bodies. These principles, as I said, are broad. They need to be operationalized at the domestic level or at the level of a basin or of the body in question. So international law promotes cooperation. It encourages states to come together and to deal jointly with these issues. The difficulty is that international law recognizes that states are sovereign and in that sense they make decisions on behalf of their own countries and where there are no strong enforcement mechanisms or mechanism incentives for them to deal with water issues comprehensively then what we see is that states make arrangements that are not necessarily in compliance with international law. So in the case of the Nile, there are a number of agreements and the current situation regarding the Eastern now is also dealt with in a tripartite agreement with the three parties. I think the law is playing a strong role here, but we have to remember that implementation of law, whether domestic but particularly international, depends also on a number of other factors that the law does not itself deal with. So political situations, economy are factors that support states in their dealings and in some cases states are not always in compliance with international water law, unfortunately. You have already partly answered this question or begun to, but Brian C asks, how can downstream stakeholders have a say in the control of a dam such as the GERD? What legal body can ensure this? So there isn't a legal body, there isn't an international water police that goes around and forces states to cooperate and I think that's maybe one of the challenges of international water law. There is this body of customary law of which the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization is a cornerstone, but beyond that it's really for states to acknowledge that they are bound by international law and to behave in compliance with international law. And in the case of water law, it seems to be harder to make states comply with it, but what the law says is that all riparians need to come together and discuss and agree jointly on activities that have an impact on the entire basin. So under international water law, the operation of a dam or activities around a dam need to be discussed and agreed and operated in such a way that international law is complied with. I'd say beyond the specific legal principles, there are a number of mechanisms that countries have turned to. The first thing we ought to recognize is that people almost never go against agreements that they've signed, water agreements that is, and so dams that have gone in place, for example, there's a dam that was jointly constructed between the USSR and Turkey, and then when the USSR broke apart, it turned out the dam was now being managed between Armenia and Turkey, and these are two countries that have had their share of tension, but that agreement continues till this day, that the two countries continue to work collaboratively. So other mechanisms that people have used, occasionally the downstream country will put an observer, actually base an observer in the upstream country. That's happened on the Nile. A downstream country might rent or lease storage space in the upstream country's dam, putting both sides, creating a shared incentive for both sides now to continue to agree to the deal or reaching beyond water in the Aral Basin, for example, the downstream countries are really concerned about the water. The upstream countries need natural gas from the downstream countries. So as we brought on the possibilities, make the pie bigger, if you will, we often can find agreements where it's in both the upstream and downstream countries incentive to continue to cooperate. Sakhib asks if the cooperation around the Indus waters will continue, given the rapidly increasing population in both countries, I assume he's referring to India and Pakistan. I'll say quickly, neither of us, I think have a crystal ball to say what will happen. We can only talk about what has happened. And I think it's really useful in the Indus especially to distinguish between what the press writes about, what their politicians talk about, and what the water people actually do in practice. So a number of times since the treaty was signed in 1960, there have been tensions, in fact, two wars were fought between the two countries. And we should note again, that in the middle of one of those wars, India made payments to Pakistan as part of their treaty obligations. So a number of times there have been stresses, and when there are political stresses between the two countries, the politicians and the journalists often have played up the possibility of walking away from the treaty, of changing the agreement or ignoring the agreement. And each and every time that there have been actual water contention, they've gone back to the treaty and followed the conflict resolution mechanisms to the letter. There are three levels of conflict resolution in the agreement. And so each time they've gone back and figured out how to use the mechanisms in the treaty to resolve. And they've only reached the third level, the most intense level, binding arbitration once, and are now trying to figure out how to follow that. So we think in a number of transboundary basins, there will continue to be greater tensions, which only require us to think more intently about agreements, how do we create more robust agreements that allow changes to be adapted to as they happen in the world? We're not hearing you any longer. Lillian from Cologne asks, since water cooperation is not only at international or interboundary level, what do you think of the concept of water stewardship as a remedy for local conflicts between big users like industries and domestic users? So I think there's definitely a need to acknowledge the issues and to deal with them. The challenge may be to find the will to do it, but perhaps through water stewardship, there can be a mobilization of local actors who are concerned and want to see changes. I think what's really important is to be able to understand what's going on in a particular situation, in a particular conflict, and to be able to identify the correct points of entry or good points of entry to engage with other stakeholders with a view to solving a conflict. I think there needs to be a number of things in place, both the will to do that, the ability to identify these points of entry, and then to be able to engage with the big users or all the users who are impacted and affected, and identifying also the processes that will be relevant in a negotiation. There's more control over the process, over the outcome. The parties will have greater ownership, but we also acknowledge that in negotiations, there may be some asymmetry in power between the different stakeholders around the table, and there needs to, if that's the case, one must consider other remedies, also other ways of trying to tackle the issue, whether it's bringing in a third party or going to court. This is also important. So I think it's a number of issues together or a number of factors that need to come together in order for that to happen. Yeah, I wanna add, it's a great question. I'd love to hear the context from which it came. I think this idea of using either stewardship or sustainability as what we call performance criteria. So when we get a group together, we ask, how will we know we've been successful? What will we use to measure our success? And these are two that you hear from time to time to help keep a process exactly to come to the types of conclusions that Zaki's talking about. If you use either stewardship or sustainability as performance criteria, so there was a basin in the Western US that was working around a set of issues, and this is ranchers and farmers and environmentalists and tribes and city people, and then there was a big multinational bottling company that wanted to come in and use some of the local springs for spring water. And there was a process, and it was really interesting how it happened because they did decide early on in the process that sustainability would be the criteria for success. And the question that people kept asking in the middle of the process was if you get what you want individually, what will the impact be on the basin as a whole? And as a result of that precise kind of conversation, it was determined by most of the participants that the bottling company really didn't belong in this particular basin. And it was by no means a unanimous agreement, but they collectively agreed that their shared vision of a future did not include this big bottling plant in the middle of their basin. Two related questions which have to do with conflicting regimes or conflicting water laws. Brian asks if you could say something on the Malawi Tanzania border dispute where colonial treaties and international laws clash at the border between the two countries. And Gaza asks many of the international treaties along the Nile were signed during the colonial era. And now some countries recognize them and some don't. How can we define the correct treaties to rule the water relations? Those are two good questions and difficult questions, I'll say. And I was just told that we have five minutes left. And I don't think I'll be able to deal with both questions in five minutes, unfortunately. I have to say also that I'm not familiar with the Malawi Tanzania border dispute and the treaties that are there and the issue of border. And I don't know if it's a border in the water or if it's a land border. Border issues have been the subject of many disputes. The International Court of Justice has been asked repeatedly to adjudicate on these matters. So in this particular case, I'm not in a position to really advise not knowing more about the context. What I would say is that, you know, treaties reflect the intentions of states at a certain point in time, but treaties are not made of stone. It's always possible to renegotiate the terms of a treaty. The issue there, of course, is that word renegotiate and bringing the parties together around the table to discuss the content of a treaty and change it is, of course, the key issue. So there's always the possibility of doing that and if that's not possible, then parties very often choose to go to court. Regarding the Nile, what we see is that often there are a number of treaties that relate to a basin. In some cases, it's only the water. In other cases, you have environmental treaties that also relate to particular basins. You have treaties of a different nature that have provisions that relate to the basin and so there is the issue of legal pluralism that applies in the case of the Nile and in the case of other basins as well. And I think there are different ways to look at it. One of them is to say, let's start from scratch and let's craft and design a new agreement that will deal with the issues without contradicting other provisions, other norms in place, other frameworks in place. And so again, this idea of negotiating and coming together where the key issue is having the political will to do that. The other way is to, and now I forgot what the other way that I wanted to explain is. I mean, the other way is again to try and, I think it's looking at the mechanisms that we have available to the states to agree. And there, if there's no agreement as to how the situation needs to be dealt with from a legal perspective, I think I would say adjudication would be the best way to resolve it if adjudication is open, because of course that's also dependent on the consent of the states. So looking at the time, I guess we can only go for a couple of short questions. One is Abhishek asks, if there have been any agreements on trans-boundary aquifers that you know of? Yeah, so very quickly there are over, or approximately 600 trans-boundary aquifers. There are a handful of agreements. The most famous one has to do with the Geneva aquifer between France and Switzerland. But there's more recently the DC aquifer between Saudi Arabia and Jordan. And there are some aquifers in Northern Africa that also have agreements relating to joint management of these aquifers. So very, very few agreements in place for now. Raj asks, how do you see the role of the private sector and businesses in water conflict mediation or transformation? I think if we really want to talk about representative stakeholder group or people who really represent the watersheds, oftentimes private sector key stakeholders in a lot of places. And I think like any stakeholder, we want to separate out what's useful to a process, which other aspects, which may be irrelevant. One of the best examples that I know of in the Western U.S. and the state of California a number of years ago, all of a sudden the CEO of Bank of America at the time the largest bank in the world looked up and realized that everything they were invested in relied on a safe, stable supply of water resources. Said it didn't matter if it was real estate or industry or agriculture, everything relied on water. And they hadn't thought about water much at all within their corporate portfolio. And so once they recognized that, they did come in quite helpfully, in fact, in a lot of the very difficult water politics in California, to help with resources, to help with process, to help with legal expertise. And this is the kind of example often that private sector can bring. They're oftentimes very efficient, very organized. They have networks. If you take Coca-Cola's distribution network throughout the world, for example, if you could harness that to bring some kind of water quality technology, this is the kind of partnership we look for. Of course, oftentimes people in different sectors have different incentives and different motives, and so it's useful to consider that as well. We're not hearing you. We actually have time to squeeze in one last question. The conflicts around water is based on the emotional relationship with water, something that was discussed. A key point, how can we incorporate that into or consider that in our scientific research? Well, let me just say, it's not either or. I think it's hand in hand. We need the science to understand what's happening in the basin, and it's not enough. We need to understand the emotional, spiritual, and physical needs of the people in the basin, and it's not enough. This is the point, I think, of hydro diplomacy, of water diplomacy. It's bringing the water and the diplomacy together precisely in the same network. And I would say one of the most powerful ways of addressing, I think, the emotional relationship we have with our water are in water festivals. It seems to me that oftentimes scientists, the strategy of science is to really scare people about the future. The trends are bad and getting worse, and people oftentimes just want to celebrate the relationship with water. So if you look at festivals that people have celebrating the art, celebrating the relationship, celebrating the higher aspirations and relationship that we have with water, and you sneak in some scientific, what's the word, bring the scientists out to help talk a little bit about the science as well. That's when we're bringing kind of heart and mind together into the same conversation. Yes, and maybe just to end, I want to say we all recognize the value of water. I think there isn't a book about water that doesn't start by saying water is life. And we say it, but when we look at our interactions around water and when we think about the conflicts that we're seeing, it sometimes feels like we forget how emotional water is. And I think, as you were saying, Aaron, we need to make sure that those emotions are there when we're looking at these issues. And for all of us and decision makers, users, private sector, diplomats, to bring that element into our considerations around water. Thank you so much. Thanks, Zaki. Thanks, Aaron. Thanks especially to the audience for joining us, for joining the discussions. The discussion extended in several directions, and so it would be difficult to summarize. But for me, the big takeaway is that cooperation around shared waters is not just dependent on goodwill of individual parties. There's a wide range of incentives to work towards cooperation between from the practical to the emotional and the spiritual and a whole lot of categories in between. We are happy that the webinar was able to start a discussion, which I'm sure we will continue to take place, which will continue to take place on several platforms in the time to come. With that, I would like to thank you again and say goodbye with the announcement that a recording of this webinar will be available on several websites, the UNESCO IIT website, and the one that I just typed into the chat box. And announcements related to future webinars will also be found there. The next webinar is in May, I understand. Further details will be announced shortly. Thanks again and goodbye. Thank you. Thank you.