Sustainable Development Goal 6 in the era of the Paris Agreement: changes and trade-offs in tailoring water challenges to global climate goals

Water and climate change have long been siloed in global governance until a recent push in the water sector to integrate water into global climate governance. This move has raised questions within the sector on whether framing water as a climate issue risks leaving behind other important water and sanitation priorities. We look back to the first and premier international forum to debate and consolidate a climate-water problem framing: the inaugural Water Pavilion at the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) in 2021. We conducted a content analysis of over 75 sessions that included nearly 450 speakers to investigate how these water advocates, practitioners, and policymakers integrated these agendas to frame water as a climate change problem. In this forum, driven by nonprofit and national government representatives, participants converged around a framing of water and climate problems as fundamentally interrelated, but overlooked water sector priorities of equity and universal access to drinking water. A ubiquitous but ambiguous use of the term resilience and focus on inclusion, and not equity, are key tensions in this emerging climate-water problem space. The water sector faces a key juncture in global governance on whether to further integrate into climate change institutions and policy structures in which water priorities may be overshadowed, or push for a stronger independent platform and risk siloing interconnected problems. The climate-water problem space is currently being defined in how national governments craft their 2025 Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement. These important climate action planning documents reflect political and funding priorities and will offer a rich site for future work to analyze how the climate-water problem framing is consolidated and described across a range of national governments.