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to agriculture, water also started to contribute as a source of energy with the development of hydropower being increasingly considered as a viable source of additional energy in the context of steady increase fossil fuels price. Water also got attention in industrial sector after the Lima Declaration of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization in 1977 recommended to have 25% of global industrial production in developing countries by the year 2000, which implied the need for more water for further industrial development. Works of the United National Environmental Programme (UNEP) and others around the same time further highlighted pollution of water bodies (i.e. inland, coastal, and the oceans), which helped to attract international concerns on the need to focus on water management in a holistic way. In these contexts, UN Water Conference held Mar del Plata, Argentina in 1977 approved the Mar del Plata Action Plan, which was the first internationally coordinated approach to IWRM. It outlined various aspects related to assessment, use, and the management of water resources (Table 1.1). The conference considered water management on a holistic and comprehensive basis, an approach recognized as one of the key IWRM issues in the 1960s. The conference was a major milestone in the history of water resources development for the 20th century. In 1980, the UN General Assembly declared 1981‐1990 as the International Drinking Water and Sanitation Decade to enhance access to those who are unreached.

      After a decade, in 1992, UN International Conference on Water and the Environment was organized in Dublin and the Conference on Environment and Development (i.e. “The Earth Summit”) in Rio de Janerio, Brazil. The Earth Summit in the presence of around 100 heads of state addressed the urgent problems of water, the environment, and socio‐economic development by signing the Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and endorsing the Rio Declaration by adopting “Agenda 21”, a plan for achieving sustainable development in the 20th century. The Section‐2 on the Chapter 18 of the “Agenda 21” mentions about IWRM. Furthermore, in response to increasing concern from the global community about world water issues, the World Water Council (WWC) was established in 1996 by renowned water specialists and international organizations.

The “age of water management” is in a sense about the management of differences in scale (community, region, nation, transboundary, and global), differences among uses (domestic, agriculture, industry, and ecosystems), and differences that have risen because of lack of harmonization among experts drawn from different disciplines to resolve water issues (Hassan 2011). Various contrasting paradigms have emerged over that time in the use and management of water, as depicted in Figure 1.1, each having their own methodology, technology, and reasoning. Further to Hassan (2011)’s illustration of paradigms, sustainability paradigm is in place since 2015 and global financial system has been further expanded to “globalized system” with aid of further dimensions. Furthermore, water has raised its profile as a key political and governance agenda over the years. Though hydro‐politics was in place since quite some time, primarily among the riparian countries of the shared aquifers and watershed, with increasing import/export of water with trade in the form of “virtual water” (Alan, 1998) by keeping the footprint of commodity somewhere else (Chapagain and Hoekstra 2004; Hoekstra and Chapagain 2007), it has become more clearly visible in recent time expanding its scope from riparian countries to across the globe. Major changes in water governance is underway since the 1990s. Water has been a key component of UN as well, and UN‐Water publishes a global report titled “The United Nations World Water Development Report (WWDR)” every year, through coordinated efforts of 26 UN agencies, providing an authoritative, comprehensive assessment of the world’s freshwater resources.

      From accumulated knowledge and information so far, it is convincing that water resources are under pressure from competing uses and climate change and governance is a key challenge in achieving the long‐term sustainability of this valuable natural resources (Özerol et al. 2018). Climate change, which manifests through water, exacerbates the pressure on water thereby further complicating resource governance (IPCC 2014). Water, in direct or implied way, has been increasing evident as a core in global commitments such as MDGs, SDGs, climate agreements, and international trades. Water challenges become the center of discussion in most international forums/platforms. Some of the global water challenges of this time, which are expected to continue in future, are growing water demand and water scarcity; water pollution; insufficient access to safe and affordable water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH); increasing risk to freshwater ecosystems; climate change impacts on water; water governance; and water cooperation and conflicts in the shared aquifers and river basins. Water solutions in the form of understanding water availability, enhancing access with reliability, reducing losses, improving WASH, and managing the water resources are advancing over the years along with advancement in science and technology. The solutions, however, are context‐specific and there are no silver bullet solutions. As water is the multi‐facet issue, stakeholders from multiple disciplines need to work together to harness benefit from the water in the most optimal way but at the same time without compromising sustainability of resources.

      1.2.2 Evolution of Climate Change as a Global Agenda

Various literatures report on emergence and spread of climate change as the global problem albeit with different orientation (e.g. BBC News 2020; History.com Editors 2020; Wear, 2008). This section presents a highly synthesized summary of climate change in the sustainability context. Early ideas that human can alter global climate can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, where people believed that humans could change temperatures and influence rainfall by chopping down trees, plowing fields or irrigating a desert. However, the theory of the greenhouse effect and the potential of industrial activities to intensify the effect were first identified by Fourier, Tyndale, and Arrhenius in 1827, 1859, and 1896, respectively. Tyndall’s laboratory tests in the late 1860s confirmed that coal gas (containing CO₂, methane and volatile hydrocarbons) is effective at absorbing solar radiation. By the 1890s, the concept of warming the planet was welcomed considering that it may benefit colder regions of the earth. By the 1930s, scientists started to argue on the potential consequences of “global warming”, which continued until the 1960s (Weart 2008). The most famous among those research projects was establishing a CO₂ monitoring station in 1958 at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory. The plot based on data from the observatory, popularly known as “Keeling Curve”, revealed a steady rise in CO₂ levels. The observation at the station, which constitutes the master time series documenting the changing composition of the atmosphere (Keeling 1998), has an iconic status in climate science as evidence of anthropogenic effect on the atmosphere’s chemical composition. Later observations of parallel trends in the atmospheric abundance of the CO₂ isotope and molecular oxygen (O₂) uniquely identified this rise in CO₂ with fossil fuel burning (Le Treut et al., 2007). Though the idea of the greenhouse effect and global warming was emerged in the 1800s, it took nearly a century of research and data, until the late 1950s, to convince the vast majority of the scientific community that human activity could alter our planet’s climate. Table 1.3 depicts a chronology of evolution of international climate negotiations over the years in light of increasing concentration of atmospheric CO₂.

Figure 1.1 A diagrammatic illustration of the historical development of water management paradigms. Shading intensity indicates the degree of dominance of a paradigm relative to others.

      (Source: Hassan F. (2011). Water history of our times: IHP Essay on water history (Volume 2). Paris, France: UNESCO Publishing. © 2011, UNESCO).

The dawn of advance computer modeling in the 1960s began to predict possible outcomes of the rise in CO₂ levels. The models consistently showed that doubling of CO₂ could produce a warming

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