World Leaders Sign Brisbane Declaration to Protect the Planet’s Freshwater Systems

More than 800 delegates from 57 countries announce official pledge to work together to protect and restore the world’s rivers and lakes

ARLINGTON, VA — November 5, 2007 — Today, delegates from the 10th International Riversymposium and Environmental Flows Conference, a recent event held in Brisbane, Australia, announced the official completion of the Brisbane Declaration to protect international freshwater resources.

“This is an extraordinary step forward to galvanizing a global community of water managers, scientists, policy makers and other stakeholders who share a common vision for protecting the Earth’s water resources, and in turn, sustaining human life,” said Nicole Silk, co-leader of The Nature Conservancy’s Global Freshwater Team.

To formalize a united front on issues of freshwater ecosystem health, Riversymposium and Environmental Flows Conference delegates agreed on a formal pronouncement – The Brisbane Declaration – to document the findings of the September 2007 conference and issue a call-to-action for the global protection and restoration of water flows that support people and nature. Today’s announcement marks the official launch of this Declaration and signifies increased support for improved water management around the globe.

Spearheaded by The Nature Conservancy’s Global Freshwater Team, The Brisbane Declaration reinforces the urgent need for a global consensus to address the growing crisis of poor water management. Recent droughts across the U.S. and around the world have highlighted the tensions that can exist between allocating water for people and water for nature. But the first step to improved water management is understanding where and when water is available, and ensuring river systems have adequate water flows (known as environmental flows) to support both people and nature. Environmental flows describe the quantity, timing, and quality of water flows required to sustain freshwater and estuarine ecosystems and the human livelihoods and well-being that depend on these ecosystems.

Specifically, the Declaration calls on water managers, governments, non-government organizations and others to:

Establish legislative, regulatory and institutional policies and frameworks to enable effective quantification, implementation and enforcement of environmental flows;
Integrate environmental flow protection and restoration into every aspect of land and water management;
Actively engage all stakeholders in environmental flow management;
Manage environmental flows based on sound science;
Formulate environmental flow standards;
Implement and enforce environmental flow standards in water governance; and,
Identify and conserve a global network of free-flowing rivers.

“The Brisbane Declaration is promise,” added Silk. “It is a commitment among like-minded entities to take the momentum building around environmental flows to the next level. If we can apply the principles of environmental flows to river systems worldwide, we can help work toward an abundant supply of clean water to support people and nature far into the future.”

“Environmental flows are necessary for healthy rivers to benefit people and nature. We have most of the science needed to get on with the job,” said Dr. Ger Bergkamp, Head of the IUCN’s (The World Conservation Union) Water Programme. “The challenge now is gaining agreement from society, particularly governments, for implementation, to work together to restore rivers,” he added.

Dr. Bergkamp said one of the initiatives of the conference was to propose a “river ethic” to be used in planning. “One of the things that came forward was a need to look much closer at what we would call a ‘river ethic,’” he said. “As a basis from which regional planning is done as the basis from which decision-making is taken forward.”

Click here to view the full text of The Brisbane Declaration.

The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org.