Listen to the river: Lessons from a global review of environmental flow success stories

How can environmental flow approaches move beyond scientific assessments and paper policies? How can we move beyond contested claims for water and hydropower to equitable trade-offs that allow for environmental flows? Is it realistic to expect that ensuring the right quantities of flow at the right times of year will become normal practice for water resource management and river basin planning?

This session will share insights from Listen to the river, a new WWF report exploring the political, institutional, economic and social processes that have led to successful environmental flow implementation in eight rivers around the world. The report sets out “common truths” that typically influence efforts to implement environmental flows. And it describes a typology of actions that governments, water users, NGOs and other can take to support protection and/or restoration of flows.

Building on the conclusions of Listen to the river, the session will seek new knowledge and ideas that WWF and other organisations can use to stimulate successful e-flow implementation elsewhere. Specifically, we will be seeking thoughts from panellists and the audience on measures that can be included the global action agenda for environmental flows that will be developed following the Riversymposium, in conjunction with the revised 2017 Brisbane Declaration.

Program

13:30: Welcome and introduction (Bill Young, World Bank)
13:40: Listen to the river: A precis (Dave Tickner, WWF)
13:50: Case studies: The Ganga, Yangtze and Mara Rivers (Nitin Kaushal, WWF-India; Robert Speed, Badu Advisory)
14:10: Panel discussion: Who should do what, by when? Building a global agenda for e-flows (Frank Radstake, Asian Development Bank; Rebecca Tharme, Riverfutures; Nitin Kaushal; Robert Speed; facilitated by Bill Young)
14:50: Conclusion: What next? (Bill Young, Dave Tickner)