Sustaining Shared Waters: An African Case Study

Jun 3, 2022 | Sarah Davidson
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Transboundary governance of shared water resources is essential to meeting the world’s most pressing challenges. One globally significant transboundary region is the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), which includes one of the last long free-flowing rivers in southern Africa, the Cuando (alternately spelled as ‘Kwando’) River. Freshwater ecosystems and species that rely on transboundary waters can also suffer without good governance. River connectivity is an important part of river health, enabling the movement of water and sediment that supports drinking water, inland fisheries, floodplain agriculture, and delta replenishment. Integrated transboundary planning approaches for energy and transportation infrastructure are critical to assessing impacts at the basin level and avoiding the fragmentation of the world’s remaining free-flowing rivers. 

The stakes of getting it wrong couldn’t be higher: increasing economic inequities and substandard public health for a growing population. And the evidence that such issues have won the attention of political leaders is increasing, with the June 2022 introduction of a White House Action Plan on Global Water Security that links this crucial issue directly to U.S. national security and offers pathways and proposed resources to advance progress broadly on multiple fronts.