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This year’s climate conference will also feature a return of the Global Climate Action Day for Water, a landmark achievement at COP22 in Marrakech, co-facilitated by the World Water Council. The reporting back from the first Global Climate Action Days was held on the eve of the COP22 closing ceremony and led to a single message for everyone working on climate and water action:Create synergies between the water and the climate arenas, between finance, governance and knowledge as pillars for water security and do justice to the African continent.This is guidance we can endorse without hesitation. We look forward to an equally historic Water Day in Bonn, and the participation of decision-makers who will speak with an equally united voice.Since 2015, the World Water Council and our partners have been opening this conversation even wider through the #ClimateIsWater initiative. This has federated more than 60 organizations from the climate and water sectors to boost the message that these two worlds are truly interconnected. This has been a great success in terms of bringing together a consensus on the importance of water to climate decision-making, and in the longer term the participants aim to bring water perspectives to the highest level of the COP and UNFCCC processes.If there is one sign that water issues have already reached the top of decision-making, it is the convening of the High Level Panel for Water, launched last year by the UN Secretary-General and President of the World Bank. This panel consists of 11 sitting Heads of State and Government and one Special Adviser. Soon after its formation these leaders called for a fundamental shift in the way the world looks at water, issuing an Action Plan for a new approach to water management that will make possible the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. If these leaders of nations have decided that the time for bold decision-making on water resources has come, then clearly a unique moment of opportunity is here for all of us.The High Level Panel for Water is still at work, and shall have the 8th World Water Forum as a major platform to present its results from 18–23 March 2018 in Brasilia, Brazil. This will be just one reason to follow and participate in the upcoming Forum. It is the world’s biggest water-related event, and next year’s Forum will be an unprecedented meeting of minds on mitigating and adapting to climate change through the all-pervasive medium of water. At the same time, as one of the main features of the World Water Forum is the open and democratic participation of actors from different sectors, it will showcase how collective decision-making can happen in a vitally important arena, all revolving around a single theme: Sharing Water.Finally, one concern that unites decisions on climate change and water is the issue of finance. Financing water infrastructure is as large a challenge as financing climate adaptation and mitigation, and indeed, is an inseparable part of these needs. The time for a major infrastructural push to protect people, cities and landscapes from water-related disasters, including the elevated risks brought by a changing climate, is here. The costs will also be major, and their full extent we can only estimate. Just to achieve the water, sanitation and hygiene components of Sustainable Development Goal 6 by 2030, we believe, will demand a tripling in capital investment and a similar jump in operating and maintenance costs.If any decisions are going to be easy to make, they certainly will not be decisions about money. Even here, however, our shared needs for climate-ready water resources point the way to collective action. To stake out this path more clearly, the World Water Council, OECD and government of the Netherlands have recently created a Roundtable on Financing Water. This first grew out of a high-level panel organized for the 7th World Water Forum, which collaboratively outlined seven proposals for action in the report ‘Water: Fit to Finance?’ Now, the Roundtable is bridging the space between the water and finance communities to hold a serious dialogue on the answer to the question posed in that report’s title. At its first meeting in April, the Roundtable began to generate political buy-in for water financing needs, and to lay the groundwork towards those most difficult of achievements: decisions.Fundamentally, countries need to be water secure if they are going to be secure against the effects of climate change. Too few of our countries are – and every month, somewhere in the world, terrible events that operate on and through the water cycle are making that clear. Yes, water can be destructive, to an extent measured in the tens of billions of dollars. It can also be a vector for adaptation, and a connector between people, who all share the same essential needs for water.I hope those needs will bring us together in Bonn, too, in a spirit of collective action: whether we call it politics, talanoa, or simply listening and working together. In the midst of climate change, we are all decision-makers, and how we choose to think about water is one of the biggest decisions we face right now. ■“IN THE MIDST OF CLIMATE CHANGE, WE ARE ALL DECISION-MAKERS”Right: The availability and sound management of water is an undeniable part of the decision-making processes that confront us 056 WATER SECURITY