Nature-based solutions (NbS) and ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) have emerged as crucial strategies for enhancing water governance in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss in India and South Asia. Forests and other natural ecosystems provide vital services such as water regulation, groundwater recharge, flood mitigation, and biodiversity conservation that underpin resilient water systems. However, conventional water governance frameworks often overlook these ecological functions, limiting their effectiveness in addressing complex environmental challenges.
This paper explores the integration of NbS and EbA into water law and governance in the region, emphasizing the critical role of forests and natural resources in sustaining water security and ecosystem health. It notes that forests act as natural sponges and filters, maintaining hydrological cycles and supporting ecological flows essential for both human and biodiversity needs. The review includes case studies from Himalayan and South Asian river basins where forest conservation and restoration initiatives have positively influenced water availability and quality.
The study highlights gaps in legal frameworks concerning the recognition and protection of ecosystem services within water governance, especially regarding transboundary water management and community participation. It underscores the need for adaptive governance models that incorporate ecological knowledge, empower local communities, and facilitate cross-sector collaboration.
Recommendations focus on institutionalizing NbS and EbA in national and regional water policies, strengthening enforcement of forest and wetland protections, and enhancing stakeholder engagement to bridge policy with on-ground conservation. By integrating forests and natural ecosystems into water governance, South Asia can advance climate-resilient, biodiversity-sensitive water management that meets social, ecological, and climatic imperatives.
This approach highlights significance of legal and governance reforms anchored in nature-based strategies that are vital for sustainable water futures amid climate and biodiversity crises.

This presentation will discuss legal pathways and barriers for freshwater landscape rehydration in Australia, focusing on New South Wales (NSW). It will present preliminary research findings to the hypothesis that effective legal and policy frameworks for restoration through landscape rehydration cannot progress without legally defining restoration law and reforming existing laws. Currently in Australia, there is no coherent legal framework, or even a foundational legal concept, to enable landscape rehydration at scale. While the science and practice of restoration and rehydration have evolved, the legal and policy frameworks have not. Freshwater landscape rehydration in Australia has received limited attention in legal scholarship with most scholarship focused on marine and coastal restoration.

Land use practices (enabled by the imposition of a foreign legal system) remain poorly adapted to Australia’s local ecological and climatic conditions. Despite fundamentally different impacts, rehydration activities must navigate the same approval pathway as infrastructure developments. Case studies will demonstrate how efforts are incidental and disjointed, governed by process-oriented planning laws rather than outcome-driven approaches.

This presentation will address the compelling need to move towards freshwater landscape rehydration while outlining how contemporary laws in Australia prioritise harm prevention and conservation. The presentation will outline findings from doctrinal analysis of legal frameworks enabling or restricting rehydration and water-retention projects. The discussion will consider shifts and proposed reforms within Australian environmental legal design towards outcome-oriented objectives. It will also identify continuing obstacles.

This presentation aligns with the subtheme focused on hydrologic conditions, water, and biodiversity conservation through analysis of current legal and policy frameworks in Australia. It will discuss case studies and propose tangible reforms. It will also consider the role and inclusion of First Nations People in restoration design and governance, drawing on Indigenous Environmental Justice, bridging this discussion to other subthemes focused on justice-based approaches.

As climate and development pressures threaten water sustainability in many transboundary basins worldwide, there is an urgent need for effective water governance. A key challenge is determining the appropriate scale for water governance, as mismatch between administrative boundaries and the extent of interconnected hydrologic systems often results in fragmented, overlapping, or inefficient governance that undermines sustainability and resilience. While basin-scale governance is often recommended to address mismatch in international contexts, coordination is complicated in basins involving federal countries—in which authority is divided among national and subnational governments. Moreover, it is unclear how federal systems influence the design and function of governance mechanisms in transboundary river basins, and what implications this has for scale challenges in water governance.

Drawing on federalism and the politics of scale, we analyze how authority is distributed among administrative levels and how actors invoke certain scales to influence water governance in the transboundary Colorado River Basin (CRB). The CRB provides water for populations across seven U.S. states, two Mexican states, and thirty sovereign Tribal nations, yet is strained by overallocation and aridification. With most of its area located in the federal country of the U.S., the CRB is governed by a patchwork of domestic laws, compacts, and decrees and an international agreement. For this context, we assess how CRB institutions have been influenced by federalism and how governance mechanisms at various scales and levels address contemporary challenges of ecosystem health, water conservation, and Tribal water sovereignty. Findings show that early CRB institutions largely reflect the federal-state power sharing that is characteristic of federalism while, when faced with increasingly constrained water resources, governance mechanisms may evolve to extend outside of the traditional federal system. This suggests that a range of multilevel governance arrangements can be relevant for water-stressed federal rivers.

Wetlands today stand at the intersection of two major challenges: the preservation of biodiversity and the sustainable management of water in the context of climate change. These two dimensions, often governed by distinct legal and policy frameworks, frequently come into tension within contemporary systems of natural resource management, particularly in the field of water. This paper examines, from a comparative perspective, how Québec and several Francophone African countries address the legal and institutional frameworks governing wetlands - ecosystems that are essential to ecological resilience.

Using an interdisciplinary approach grounded in water law, environmental law, and conservation policy, the analysis highlights the degree of integration or fragmentation between the instruments governing water management and those dedicated to biodiversity protection. In Québec, governance relies on watershed-based planning and integrated management mechanisms, while in Francophone Africa, it is characterized by sectoral regulations that combine statutory, customary, and community-based norms.

The comparative analysis identifies the conditions for the emergence of ecosystem-based management, capable of linking local knowledge, public institutions, and ecological imperatives. It calls for a transition toward flexible and context-sensitive frameworks that reconcile water management and biodiversity conservation objectives within a perspective of shared cooperation.

In conclusion, this paper argues for a legal and institutional renewal of wetland management, grounded in flexibility, multi-level cooperation, and the recognition of local socio-ecological dynamics, key conditions for addressing the intertwined crises of water and biodiversity in an era of global environmental change.