NEW YORK, March 24, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- As global leaders come together today in New York for the United Nations 2023 Water Conference, the NDC Partnership is stepping up support for countries to put water at the heart of national economic policies and international decision-making. 

"Increasingly, water is a stumbling block for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals," says Netherlands Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Liesje Schreinemacher. "We aim to make water the driver to achieve our ambitions on climate, diversity, equity and prosperity. To do so, we must organize our resources locally and globally. This means changing our approach in two fundamental ways. First, we need to change the focus of water governance and apply a Water Nexus approach. Second, we need to value water for its economic worth and its broader ecosystem benefits. Countries' climate commitments, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), are critical to the success of this approach." 

We must respond to the call to action from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water that "the world will fail on climate and development, if it fails on water." Supporting water-climate adaptation and mitigation action is a way to implement development, climate and biodiversity goals. The Partnership supports countries to deliver on climate action, decreasing their climate vulnerability related to water and increasing public and private investments in Water-Nexus opportunities. Right now, 90% of countries' NDCs, prioritize action on water for adaptation and roughly all National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) include water and sanitation as a priority sector (UNEP 2022). Yet implementation lags and financing is insufficient to ensure these targets are met.

Building on the momentum of the conference, with the initial financial support from the Netherlands of EUR 5 million, the NDC Partnership will provide technical assistance to countries to enhance the integration of water in formulating, updating, financing and implementing their NDCs. Specifically, the Partnership will provide guidance to countries on opportunities to strengthen NDC implementation through a water-climate nexus approach.

"With initial support from the Netherlands, the NDC Partnership will help countries leverage opportunities across the Water Nexus. We welcome the creativity of our partners like IFAD, in exploring how we can effectively work together on this issue and ask everyone engaged in the Partnership to similarly contribute to putting water at the heart of economic policy making," says Minister Schreinemacher.