Strengthening cooperation on transboundary groundwater resources

Water is life’s most important natural resource, and groundwater is humanity’s most vital source of that life-giving substance. Global freshwater resources contained in aquifer systems are two orders of magnitude greater than those found in rivers, lakes and other surface freshwaters combined. Moreover, more than one half of the world’s population today is dependent on groundwater for its basic needs (Eckstein 2003). A large number of the aquifers on which humanity depends lay across and underneath international political borders. According to the most recent studies of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), transboundary aquifers underlie the territory of nearly every non-island nation (Puri and Aureli 2009). The International Shared Aquifer Resources Management (ISARM) initiative, which was launched by UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme (IHP) in 2000, has identified more than 270 transboundary aquifers worldwide (Stephan 2009). In recent years, as communities and nations realized the significance of these shared freshwater resources, transboundary aquifers have become the subject of growing attention among aquifer riparians and the international community. Questions are now being raised with regard to the mechanisms for governing shared groundwater resources, the rights that aquifer riparians enjoy from a transboundary aquifer and the reponsibilities that these nations might owe to other aquifer riparians. As a result, in 2002, building on its prior work that led to the formulation of the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses, the United Nations International Law Commission (UNILC) decided to continue its work on “shared natural resources” focusing on transboundary aquifers (Yamada 2003). As part of that effort, UNESCO-IHP, through its ISARM initiative, mobilized hydrogeologists, water resources managers, water law experts and groundwater administrators to provide advisory support to the UNILC. Within a relatively short period of six years, the UNILC completed 19 draft articles, which it submitted in 2008 to the 63rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Thereafter, the UNGA adopted the Resolution on the Law of Transboundary Aquifers (A/RES/63/124) in December 2008, which included in its annex the 19 draft articles. The draft articles have now been placed on the provisional agenda of the 66th session of the UNGA, scheduled for Autumn 2011.