ASSESSING THE STATUS OF INTERNATIONAL WATERS

The Global International Waters Assessment (GIWA) is currently conducting a strategic assessment of the status of environmental problems and their impacts on nature and human society at a strategic and global level. The GIWA project is an initiative of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and was created as a response to the need for funding priorities. The financial resources that are available for remedial actions for environmental problems in international waters are limited, and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) therefore commissioned GIWA to produce globally comparable assessment results that can be used for funding priorities. The GIWA project is meant to provide the GEF with objective and strategic guidance for prioritizing its future interventions in the International Waters Focal Area. This requires a holistic evaluation of the state of freshwater catchments and their associated marine areas globally, and an analysis of the socio-economic causes of the key issues contributing to degradation of water resources in the most impacted areas. The project will provide background and analytical information to identify priorities for remedial and mitigatory actions in international waters, achieving environmental benefits at national, regional, and global levels. GIWA aims to evaluate a myriad of environmental and socio-economic aspects in sub-regions of the planet’s surface, including both marine and freshwater systems. However, GEF is only concerned with international waters whose shared water bodies have a transboundary (across borders) separation of causes (i.e., human activities) and impacts (i.e., negative changes to environment); this represents the major limitation to the scope of the project. The project (UNEP, 1999) is executed by the UNEP Division of Early Warning and Assessments in