Blue Peace - Invest in Peace through Water

Blue Peace in collaboration with the United Nations Capital Development Fund, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and Geneva Water Hub (GWH), introduce an innovative way of financing transboundary and multi-sectoral water cooperation, by creating new ways to access financial capital through a Blue Peace approach. Ultimately leading to circular economies and stable societies. Blue Peace focuses on transforming water from a potential crisis source, into a potential cooperation and peace instrument. Water being an entry point for transboundary cooperation.

The “Blue Peace, Invest in Peace Through Water” paper, authored by Pio Wennubst, Jaffer Machano, Rukan Manaz,Johan Gély, Isabella Pagotto and Francesca Valentini, outlines the details of why invest in water and how to do so. The aim of this paper is to advocate change in the way financing is approached for water investments in multi sectoral transboundary and municipality settings. The main goal is to have a commercial methodology that is replicable and scalable while not replacing any kind of existing financial agreements and public resources, but rather creating new ways to access financial capital, leading to a sustainable and circular economy.

The Blue Peace approach is suggesting that water is the perfect entry point to focus on the nexus between sustainable development and peaceful societies. Moving towards a sustainable, integrated, cross-sectoral and transboundary management of water. This implies that investments are undertaken as a result of negotiated political agreements among completely diverse interests which define how to share common water resources.

The need for the creation of a new market and the introduction of financial instruments that allow the blending of public funds with the private sector funds to finance sustainable water projects generating multiple benefits will unlock access to additional capital for municipalities and transboundary water bodies, providing new and larger private-based capital to development projects in line with the 2030 Agenda.

Publications
Blue Peace - Invest in Peace through Water