Freshwater Strategic Priorities 2022-2025

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has released a new strategic document outlining its freshwater-related priorities for implementing UNEP’s Medium-Term Strategy (MTS), 2022-2025. These aim to galvanize urgent understanding, prioritization and action for water worldwide.

Produced by the Inter-Divisional Water Group, a community of practice across UNEP, the document describes what and how freshwater issues help meet the water-related Sustainable Development Goal and address the three interlinked planetary crises in the MTS:

• Climate change

• Nature and biodiversity loss

• Pollution and waste

The impacts of all three of these inter-related planetary crises are directly, and in some cases disproportionately, felt on freshwater bodies, which are essential for the lives, livelihoods and health of people, economies and the planet.