Freshwater Challenge

The Freshwater Challenge is a multi-stakeholder partnership to integrate freshwater restoration in national action programs, relevant policies and planning frameworks across sectors and channel support at country and basin-level with the aim of bringing life and ecosystem services back to our rivers and inland wetlands and of supporting sustained prosperity for people and nature.
Objectives
- To fulfill the vision, the partnership will pursue three objectives:
- Set freshwater restoration targets and mainstream these ambitions in national policy agendas to promote policy coherence across sectors and accelerate the national-level achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the Paris Agreement, and other multilateral frameworks.
- Collect commitments, initiatives, and actions from all the stakeholders engaged in freshwater restoration to account for their contributions and to improve planning, measuring progress and harmonizing reporting.
Mobilize resources to accelerate implementation and support members and partners to achieve their restoration targets.

Rationale
The important role of healthy freshwater ecosystems has been recognized in key international development frameworks, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), Ramsar Convention on Wetlands and Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. However, responsibilities and competencies remain highly fragmented among different organizations, programs, and funds. UN–Water was created to offer a platform for discussion and coordination among different actors engaged in global water governance, but it did not manage to influence policy frameworks nor connect them with knowledge generation.
At the national level, coordination among the different actors is often difficult. Several countries still face internal siloed approaches to water management as well as challenges to mainstream the topic into national sustainable development strategies and other climate and environmental related plans. To make matters more complicated, the issue of complementarity versus duplication of national targets/commitments made under different processes remains unsolved.