Green Cross International, the environmental NGO founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, is calling for all Governments to ratify the global watercourse convention to help address the world’s worsening water crisis and avert future catastrophes.

Green Cross International President Alexander Likhotal said:

“The acute crisis currently hitting the Horn of Africa highlights human vulnerability to severe droughts and illustrates that threats to global security and social justice of the global water crisis are upon us.”  

Green Cross International is marking the closing of the annual World Water Week forum in Stockholm, Sweden, by urging all countries to ratify the UN Watercourses Convention. The convention is the only global legal instrument governing the use, management and protection of the world’s 276 trans-boundary watercourses. These rivers and the groundwater linked to them are shared by 145 countries. Their basins are home to 40% of the world’s population.

Officially known as the Convention on the Law of the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses and adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1997 by a vast majority of countries, the Convention still has not yet come into force.

To date, countries have managed shared watercourses by adopting basin and regional agreements. However, only 40% of the World’s international watercourses enjoy some sort of agreement and those which exist are sometimes incomplete, obsolete and by definition do not have the same scope as global instruments.

Thirty-five countries must ratify the UN Watercourses Convention for it to come into force. So far, 24 countries have done so, including most recently Burkina Faso, Morocco and France.

Green Cross International’s Water Programme director, Marie-Laure Vercambre, says 900 million people live without secured access to clean water and one-third of the world’s population live in countries that are water-stressed, or receive inadequate amounts of annual rainfall.

“Extreme weather events, such as the drought affecting East Africa, remind us the stakes are global. Greater cooperation and more rules on managing shared watersheds are needed as each country will be impacted, directly or indirectly, by how well other countries manage their water resources.”

Ms Vercambre added: “Countries must respond to today’s water challenges by ratifying the UN Watercourses Convention.”

The United Kingdon is a signatory to the Convention, but has yet to ratify it. The United States, China, India, Arab States in the Middle East and Israel are among the countries who have to date neither signed or ratified the Convention. 

For a full list of countries who have ratified the Convention click here.