UNITED NATIONS: Pakistan has stressed the need for transboundary water cooperation, which responds to the challenges of shared water resources, as the world faces rising water scarcity.
“With most of world’s water resources, being shared between two or more countries, need for transboundary cooperation assumes even greater urgency,” Pakistani delegate Senator Farooq Naek told the Annual Parliamentary Hearing, a joint initiative between the President of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU).
Speaking in a dialogue on ‘Transboundary waters: From competition to cooperation for peace’, he said that cooperation in this regard plays a crucial role, in supporting wider regional integration, peace and sustainable development, as well as in tackling regional security challenges.
“It also plays a crucial role, in addressing climate change impacts, which place significant pressure on world’s transboundary waters,” Senator Naek said.
UN officials said that the Hearing will provide a parliamentary contribution to the UN Water Conference, which is being held from March 22-24, 2023, in New York.
More than 250 members of parliament, speakers, advisers and related officials from 60 countries are participating in the event at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
In his remarks, Senator Naek said that strengthening transboundary water cooperation was also essential for reaching, water-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets, and broader sustainable development targets.
For Pakistan, he said that transboundary water cooperation was of extreme importance as the country depended, for more than seventy per cent of its surface freshwater, on Indus River Basin’s major tributaries. –Agencies
