By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, INDIA, Aug 24 2023 – Sadiq Dar, 68, is surprised how the heavy siltation of Wular Lake has turned many of its areas into land masses. “When we were growing up, we would only see water in this lake. Now, we see cattle grazing in it while a large portion is also being used by children for playing cricket,” he tells IPS.

Overlooked by magnificent mountains, Wular Lake is one of the largest freshwater lakes in Asia and the largest flood basin of Kashmir in Bandipora district, some 34 km north of Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Administered Kashmir.

An international Ramsar site under the Ramsar convention, this beautiful lake has served the people of Kashmir for centuries earning praises from all, including its poets.

“How long will they remain hidden from the world … the unique gems that Wular Lake holds in its depth,” 20^th century Urdu poet Sir Muhammed Iqbal once wrote about Wular Lake’s depth and water expanse.

Almost a century after Iqbal’s inquisitiveness, the depths of Wular have become heavily silted, its size reduced, and its pristine waters suffer from heavy pollution. This large Himalayan water body and Dal Lake in Srinagar play a key role in flood management, water security and livelihood generation in the region.

But a NASA report recently revealed that both these lakes — Dal Lake and Wular Lake — have witnessed a large reduction in size due to land conversions, urbanization, and deforestation in recent decades. This not only poses a threat of repeated flooding in Kashmir but will negatively influence livelihood generation and the availability of water for the communities.

“The conversion of forests to paved urban areas is a major driver of the change in water quality. Land conversion has delivered heavy sediment and nutrient loads into the lake, and untreated sewage from urban areas has also contributed,” says the NASA report.

“Some of the bright green areas on the eastern side of Wular Lake used to be open water. Nutrient-rich sediment and aquatic vegetation have filled in parts of the lake and contributed to its shrinking in recent decades,” the report further says and adds: “In a 2022 study, researchers in India—using data from the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) LISS-IV instrument—found that Wular Lake’s open water area had shrunk in size by about one-quarter between 2008 and 2019.”

In a detailed study of the lake, Wetlands International, a Netherlands-based not-for-profit that works to sustain and restore wetlands globally, had also revealed earlier that there was a 45 percent reduction in the lake area mainly because parts of the lake were converted for agriculture and willow tree plantations.

Wular Lake is crucial for saving Kashmir from floods. In recent years, the region has witnessed repeated flood-like situations following the devastating 2014 flooding. The recent IPPCC reports have predicted that there will be an increase in floods and other extreme weather events across South Asia in the coming years as the climate crisis deepens.

The Dal Lake, says the NASA report, has suffered a similar fate in response to land cover change. Researchers in Srinagar found that land conversion to urban development in the basin had worsened the lake’s water quality and contributed to its reduced size, the report says. They found that between 1980 and 2018, the lake shrunk in area by 25 percent, it added.

The marshy and water body area of Dal Lake, a major tourist attraction in Srinagar, has shrunk from 2,547 hectares in 1971 to 1,620 hectares in 2008, another study titled Impact of Urban Land Transformation on Water Bodies found earlier.

How to Stop the Lakes from Shrinking?  

Wular Lake and Dal Lake are crucial for the region’s flood management and livelihood generation. Besides acting as a flood absorption basin for Kashmir during high flows in the region’s major river, Jhelum, Wular, and Dal Lake provide livelihood support to over 100,000 families dependent on tourism and fishing, said Samiullah Bhat, senior Assistant Professor at Kashmir University’s Environment and Science department.

To stop further shrinkage of Wular and Dal Lakes, Bhat said that soil erosion in the catchment area of these water bodies, which is resulting in these lakes becoming silted up, must be stopped. “It is because of the massive soil erosion that parts of water bodies are turning into landmasses,” Bhat told IPS.

Regarding encroachments in these lakes, Bhat said that geofencing is one way to mark the boundaries of these lakes, followed by close monitoring. “It has been done recently in the case of Wular Lake, and the same can be done for Dal Lake as well,” Bhat said.

“It is a matter of proper governance, management and effective enforcement of laws for the protection of environmental assets,” he further said, adding that land ownership records and revenue records are also not that transparent, which also need to be addressed for protecting these lakes from further damage.

According to a study, Dal Lake represents a case of a threatened ecosystem in dire need of management, with land use changes, erosion, enhanced nutrient enrichment and rising human population in its catchment as the major threats to its existence.

“Regulation of a proper land use plan in the Dal Lake catchment is vital for preventing the further nutrient enrichment and sedimentation of the lake waters,” the study says.

Aijaz Rasool, an engineer who has worked on these water bodies previously, said that all the areas of Dal Lake and Wular Lake need to be prioritised for complete conservation work. “For years, I have observed that only those areas of the lakes get attention which are visited by tourists, the other sides get least or no attention and keep deteriorating and encroaching. For example, the north-western parts of Dal Lake and Wular,” Rasool said and added that once all the areas of these lakes receive equal conservational treatment, conserving them will get easier.

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By Daniel D. Bradlow
PRETORIA, South Africa, Aug 24 2023 – Many people may be tempted to view the World Bank’s recent announcement that it will freeze new loans to Uganda because of the country’s vicious anti-LGBTIQ+ law as a harbinger of the Bank taking a more progressive approach to human rights issues.

While the announcement is welcome, based on my many years studying the Bank and on my research for my forthcoming book, The Law of the International Financial Institutions, I think there are good reasons to be cautious about its significance.

The World Bank, which has been operating for over 75 years, has 189 member states as shareholders. It funds development projects and programmes in member states that have annual per capita incomes below about US$12,535. The member states elect a Board of Executive Directors that oversees the Bank’s operations and approves all its loans.

The Bank’s Articles of Agreement stipulate that it cannot base its decisions on political grounds. The articles state that the Bank “shall not interfere in the political affairs” of its member states. Nor should its decisions be influenced by the “political character” of these states.

Moreover, the Bank is instructed that it should only pay attention “to considerations of economy and efficiency”. And that it should not be affected by “political or other non-economic influences or considerations.”

The articles don’t define these key terms. They also don’t identify the criteria the Bank should consider when deciding if a particular issue should be excluded from consideration because it is “political” rather than “economic”.

This means that this decision is within the exclusive discretion of the Bank’s decision makers.

Division of labour

The Articles were drafted and agreed in 1944. At the time, the division of responsibilities between those who made the “political” decisions and those who made the “economic” ones seemed relatively clear.

It was assumed that each Bank member state, as an exercise of its sovereignty, would decide for itself how to deal with the social, environmental, and cultural impacts and consequences of the particular transaction for which it was seeking the Bank’s support.

The Bank, on the other hand, would take the state’s decisions on these issues as given. It would merely consider if the particular loan request was technically sound and economically and financially feasible.

This division of responsibility, of course, was unrealistic. The Bank’s Board of Executive Directors must approve each loan. They represent its member states. It is inevitable that officials elected or appointed by – and ultimately accountable to states – will pay close attention to the political implications of their decisions.

And that these considerations may trump the technical merits of the transaction. Thus, inevitably, political considerations, including human rights, have always been, at least implicitly, a factor in Bank operations.

The futility of the Bank’s attempt to exclude political, including human rights, considerations from its operations can be seen at two levels. Firstly, at the level of the Bank’s relations with its member states. Secondly, at the level of individual transactions.

A good example of the Bank’s failed efforts to exclude political factors at the country level was its decision in the 1960s to lend to Portugal and South Africa to fund the construction of the Cahora Basa dam in Mozambique.

The Bank decided to make this loan despite a UN General Assembly effort to impose sanctions on these countries because of their colonial and apartheid policies.

Many African states, supported by a majority of UN member countries, argued that the loan should have been denied. Their case was that the policies of the borrowers violated the human rights of their subjects. They were also a threat to regional peace and security.

The Bank’s General Counsel defended the decision on the basis of the political prohibition in the Bank’s articles and on the technical merits of the project. Despite its ostensible non-political position, the Bank did not make any further loans to South Africa until it became a democratic state.

At the individual transaction level, the Bank funds projects and programmes that have profound social and environmental impacts. Consequently, it is forced to pay attention to some of the political, including human rights, implications of these projects and programmes.

For example, if it finances a road or a renewable energy project, the project will require land. The current occupants of the land may need to be moved to make way for the project.

Alternatively, the project may have social and environmental effects that hurt people. It could, for example, affect the surrounding community’s ability to grow food, or place the community at higher risk of accidents or exposes more young girls and women to the risk of gender-based violence.

If the affected community belong to minority groups in the country, with their own language, culture, and geographic attachments, they may qualify as indigenous people under international law and the Bank’s policies. In this case, the project may require their free, prior informed consent.

However, there are disagreements among states and between the Bank and some of its member states about which communities qualify as indigenous and what is required to ensure that their rights are respected.

For example, some states and Bank stakeholders contend that it is enough to seek the consent of the community’s leadership. But others maintain that the consent can only be established if particular vulnerable groups within the communities, such as women, youth, LGBTIQ+, or disabled people, are given specific opportunities to express their consent.

Some states may argue that giving such attention to these vulnerable groups is inconsistent with local practices and customs and that the Bank, pursuant to its own Articles, should not be interfering with these internal “political” matters.

In all these cases, the Bank has to exercise judgement. This means, for example, that in the Uganda case, the Bank could decide that it should not extend any new credit to

However, it is also easy to see that in another context the Bank – or its Board of Executive Directors – may conclude that on balance it is better to continue lending to the particular country despite serious human rights issues. Or to a particular project because the perceived benefits outweigh the costs.

The challenge, of course, is ensuring that the Bank is making these decisions on a principled and predictable basis. And not according to its own whims and political preferences. And that it can be held accountable for the way in which it makes the decisions.

Daniel D. Bradlow is Professor/Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria

Source: Conversation Africa

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Aug 24 2023 – International governance arrangements are in trouble. Condemned as ‘dysfunctional’ by some, multilateral agreements have been discarded or ignored by the powerful except when useful to protect their interests or provide legitimacy.

Economic multilateralism under siege
Undoubtedly, many multilateral arrangements have become less appropriate. At their heart is the United Nations (UN) system, conceived in the last year of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency and World War Two.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The 1944 UN conference at Bretton Woods sought to build the foundations for the post-war economic order. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) would create conditions for lasting growth and stability, with the World Bank financing post-war reconstruction and post-colonial development.

The Bretton Woods agreement allowed the US Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) to issue dollars, as if backed by gold. In 1971, President Richard Nixon repudiated the US’s Bretton Woods obligations. With US military and ‘soft’ power, widespread acceptance of the dollar since has effectively extended the Fed’s ‘exorbitant privilege’.

This unilateral repudiation of US commitments has been a precursor of the fate of some other multilateral arrangements. Most were US-designed, some in consultation with allies. Most key privileges of the global North – especially the US – continue, while duties and obligations are ignored if deemed inconvenient.

The International Trade Organization (ITO) was to be the third leg of the post-war multilateral economic order, later reaffirmed by the 1948 Havana Charter. Despite post-war world hegemony, the ITO was rejected by the protectionist US Congress.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) became the compromise substitute. Recognizing the diversity of national economic capacities and capabilities, GATT did not impose a ‘one-size-fits-all’ requirement on all participants.

But lessons from such successful flexible precedents were ignored in creating the World Trade Organization (WTO) from 1995. The WTO has imposed onerous new obligations such as the all-or-nothing ‘single commitment’ requirement and the Agreement on Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

Overcoming marginalization
In September 2021, the UN Secretary-General (SG) issued Our Common Agenda, with new international governance proposals. Besides its new status quo bias, the proposals fall short of what is needed in terms of both scope and ambition.

Problematically, it legitimizes and seeks to consolidate already diffuse institutional responsibilities, further weakening UN inter-governmental leadership. This would legitimize international governance infiltration by multi-stakeholder partnerships run by private business interests.

The last six decades have seen often glacially slow changes to improve UN-led gradual – mainly due to the recalcitrance of the privileged and powerful. These have changed Member State and civil society participation, with mixed effects.

Fairer institutions and arrangements – agreed to after inclusive inter-governmental negotiations – have been replaced by multi-stakeholder processes. These are typically not accountable to Member States, let alone their publics.

Such biases and other problems of ostensibly multilateral processes and practices have eroded public trust and confidence in multilateralism, especially the UN system.

Multi-stakeholder processes – involving transnational corporate interests – may expedite decision-making, even implementation. But the most authoritative study so far found little evidence of net improvements, especially for the already marginalized.

New multi-stakeholder governance – without meaningful prior approval by relevant inter-governmental bodies – undoubtedly strengthens executive authority and autonomy. But such initiatives have also undermined legitimacy and public trust, with few net gains.

All too often, new multi-stakeholder arrangements with private parties have been made without Member State approval, even if retrospectively due to exigencies.
Unsurprisingly, many in developing countries have become alienated from and suspicious of those acting in the name of multilateral institutions and processes.

Hence, many in the global South have been disinclined to cooperate with the SG’s efforts to resuscitate, reinvent and repurpose undoubtedly defunct inter-governmental institutions and processes.

Way forward?
But the SG report has also made some important proposals deserving careful consideration. It is correct in recognizing the long overdue need to reform existing governance arrangements to adapt the multilateral system to current and future needs and requirements.

This reform opportunity is now at risk due to the lack of Member State support, participation and legitimacy. Inclusive consultative processes – involving state and non-state actors – must strive for broadly acceptable pragmatic solutions. These should be adopted and implemented via inter-governmental processes.

Undoubtedly, multilateralism and the UN system have experienced growing marginalization after the first Cold War ended. The UN has been slowly, but surely superseded by NATO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), led by the G7 group of the biggest rich economies.

The UN’s second SG, Dag Hammarskjold – who had worked for the OECD’s predecessor – warned the international community, especially developing countries, of the dangers posed by the rich nations’ club. This became evident when the rich blocked and pre-empted the UN from leading on international tax cooperation.

Seeking quick fixes, ‘clever’ advisers or consultants may have persuaded the SG to embrace corporate-dominated multi-stakeholder partnerships contravening UN norms. More recent SG initiatives may suggest his frustration with the failure of that approach.

After the problematic and controversial record of such processes and events in recent years, the SG can still rise to contemporary challenges and strengthen multilateralism by changing course. By restoring the effectiveness and legitimacy of multilateralism, the UN will not only be fit, but also essential for humanity’s future.

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