Water, Climate Change, and Sustainability. Группа авторов

which succeeded in raising public awareness of the need to integrate environment and development. UNFCCC was an outcome of the conference, which is a climate change agreement that led to the Kyoto Protocol, Agenda 21, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. 11. 1992 Agenda 21 with a focus on Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) Among the major international water management events, 1992 UN conference on environment and development (UNCED) held at Rio de Janeiro stands out as an event of outstanding importance. UNCED covered a very broad range of development issues and from a water resources perspective was informed by the International Conference on Water and Environment with its highly influential “Dublin Principles. UNCED produced “Agenda 21”, which in section 2 of Chapter 18 mentioned about integrated water resources management (IWRM). 12. 1988 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Is a scientific and intergovernmental body under the auspices of United Nations dedicated to the task of providing the world with an objective, scientific view of climate change and its political and economic impacts. It provides scientific, technical and socio‐economic information relevant to understanding of risk of human induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. 13. 1987 Montreal Protocol Montreal Protocol on substance that deplete the Ozone layer in an international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the production of numerous substances that are responsible for ozone depletion for example chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that are present in our air‐conditioners and refrigerators. It was agreed on 16 September 1987 and entered into force on 1 January, 1989. 14 1977 Mar del Plata Action Plan The UN Conference on Water was held in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 1977. The conference approved the Mar del Plata Action Plan, which was the first internationally coordinated approach to IWRM. It discussed assessment of water use and efficiency; natural hazards, environment, health and pollution control; policy, planning and management; public information, education, training and research; and regional and international cooperation (Biswas, 2004). The conference considered water management on a holistic and comprehensive basis, an approach recognized as one of the key IWRM issues in the 1960s. The conference was a major milestone in the history of water resources development for the twentieth century. 15 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and Stockholm Declaration Also known as the Stockholm Conference, it was the UN's first major conference on international environmental issues. Along with the declaring 26 principles concerning the environment and development (Stockholm Declaration), it marks a turning point in the development of international environmental politics, including establishment of UN Environmental Programs (UNEP, currently renamed as UN‐Environment).

Table 1.2 Sustainability challenges across multiple sectors or issues interlinked with water security.

      Source: Modified from UN‐Water (2019b).

Interlinkages	Facts underlying challenges to sustainable development
Climate change	More than 2 billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress. By 2030, water scarcity in some arid and semi‐arid places will displace between 24 million and 700 million people due to climate change.
Disaster	About 90% of all natural disasters are water‐related. Over the period 1995–2015, floods affected 2.3 billion people, killing 157,000 and causing US$662 billion in damage
Ecosystem	Ecosystems across the world, particularly wetlands, are in decline in terms of the services they provide
Energy	Roughly 75% of all industrial water withdrawals are used for energy production, while 90% of global power generation is water‐intensive.
Food	Agriculture (including irrigation, livestock and aquaculture) is by far the largest water consumer, accounting for 69% of annual water withdrawals globally.
Education	Lack of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) at home and school directly impact education due to multitude of factors such as inability to attend school due to time lost for fetching water or sickness from water borne disease and school dropout of girls
Gender	Women and girls are responsible for water collection in 8 out of 10 households with water off premises.
Health	Some 297 000 children under five who die annually from diarrheal diseases due to poor WASH. About 44 million pregnant women have sanitation‐related hookworm infections. Loss of productivity to water‐ and sanitation‐related diseases costs many countries up to 5% of gross domestic product (GDP).
Human right	Lack of access to safe, sufficient and affordable WASH facilities has a devastating effect on the health, dignity, prosperity, and for the realization of other human rights of billions of people.
Urbanization	In 2017, more than half of the global population live in towns and cities. By 2050, that proportion is expected to rise to two‐thirds. Filling a resource and infrastructure gap for supplying water, sewer and wastewater management facilities is challenging for creating sustainable cities.

      Water management on both local and regional levels has undergone a series of historical transformation in the form of invention and widespread use of irrigation and drainage methods, water‐lifting devices, long‐distance water transport technologies, and storage facilities (Hassan 2011). From the start of early artificial irrigation in Egypt some 7000 years ago, water use and management has stepped‐up through different ages such as “water‐lifting technology (400 to 2200 years ago)”, “water industry”, “water science and modernity”, and “water management (from the middle of the 20th century onwards)” (Hassan 2011). After the start of modern industrialization in the 1800s, world population increased rapidly, urbanization started to take momentum, and a new set of services to cater for the changing world created a new demand for water in addition to allocation for agriculture. With the increasing use of water for various uses, the international scientific community together with governments realized water resources as one of the primary limiting factors for harmonious socio–economic developments in many regions of the world (Makarigakis and Jimenez‐Cisneros 2019). Realizing the need of internationally coordinated cooperation mechanisms to solve the water problems, 1965‐1974 was declared as the International Hydrological Decade (IHD), which gave birth of UNESCO’s International Hydrological Program (IHP) in 1971 to focus on research and capacity building in hydrological sciences in true sense.

The role of water in the overall development process became increasingly evident from the 1970s after the occurrence of several droughts and floods in many parts of the world during the early 1970s contributed to a major food crisis. As a result, at the World Food Conference held in Rome in 1974, water resources management emerged as a key for furthering horizontal expansion of agriculture as well as increasing productivity from existing