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Sustainable development integrates economic development, social development, and environmental protection, with three overarching objectives and essential requirements: (1) poverty reduction, (2) changing unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, and (3) protecting and managing the natural resource base of economic and social development. Integrated water resources management (IWRM) is capable of promoting all three objectives by providing stakeholders with a framework for integrating and coordinating the various aspects of water management in a sustainable and holistic manner. This chapter relates the concept of IWRM to development in the context of the international community’s sustainable development paradigm.

Climate change presents the international community with an environmental process that is both challenging to monitor and foresee and requires a complex legal and regulatory framework capable of promoting mitigation and adaptation. In the absence of comprehensive and targeted international climate change legislation, however, some mitigation and adaptation measures are being adopted and implemented through indirect policymaking and regulation. International environmental treaties and customary international environmental laws and principles not specifically focused on climate change may nonetheless indirectly or unintentionally contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts through administration or enforcement of the legal regime. The crucial role that the water cycle plays in climatic processes, however, makes international freshwater and ocean laws and policies a particularly rich source of indirect climate change adaptation and mitigation measures. This chapter analyzes the international legal regimes regulating freshwater resources and ocean and marine resources with an eye toward mechanisms that contribute to – or detract from – climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. I find that potential for regulation of climate change is greatest when treaties are focused on discrete environmental issues such as wetland conservation and pollution from ships, while comprehensive treaties like the Watercourses Convention and the Convention on the Law of the Sea make less tangible contributions to indirect climate change regulation by reinforcing principles of international law that require states to take collective action on international environmental challenges such as climate change.

The Kura-Aras River Basin is the largest and most critical water resource in the South Caucasus. As the primary source of freshwater for Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan and a significant source for Turkey and Iran, the basin is at the center of a complex geopolitical region. The Kura-Aras has not been managed under a cooperative management treaty since the fall of the Soviet Union and remains one of the most significant watercourses ungoverned by a transboundary agreement. Tense relations between neighbors, as well as ambitious development plans and economic priorities, have pushed international cooperation over the basin to the fringes of the region’s agenda. In this chapter, the Kura-Aras River Basin is examined in order to identify factors inhibiting, and opportunities to promote, cooperation. While a multilateral, basin-wide treaty appears unrealistic given extreme levels of diplomatic discord, opportunities exist to move toward a cooperative management framework through bilateral agreements.

With the current body of international water law limited to customary principles and nascent treaty instruments, the potential for major transboundary water resources conflict is high. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Nile River Basin. At about 6,825 km long, the Nile is the longest river in the world, sustaining the livelihoods of more than 180 million people in 11 riparian countries. And yet, the Nile River continues to flow without a binding cooperative management treaty or agreement. While the Nile Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA) may soon come into force, it lacks the support and participation of two of the largest players in the region, downstream Egypt and Sudan. Meanwhile, basin countries’ interpretations of customary international water law highlight the inherent and predictable difficulties of reconciling the principles of equitable use and no significant harm. Considering the Nile River Basin’s critical importance to the economic development of basin states, the absence of a binding cooperative management agreement places the Nile River Basin at risk of conflict and continued mismanagement. This chapter analyzes the legal status of Nile River Basin water allocations through the lens of contemporary international water law, a developing body of law struggling to resolve transboundary disputes such as those found in the Nile River Basin.