Adaptation regulatory regimes to address climate change challenges in transboundary water basins: Can multilateral regionalism help?

Abstract

Global climate change threatens regional water security in various ways. The transboundary waters flowing across Asia from their source in the Himalayan 'water towers' are finite resources, already adversely impacted by rising temperatures. China and India share many of the river basins of this region, and both countries implement ambitious national development plans that rely on these resources. Global approaches to address climate change issues on transboundary waters have emerged, but require national and regional cooperative actions, supported by coherent regulatory regimes with adaptation at the core. In the absence of transboundary water agreements between China and India, how will they meet the impacts of changing climatic conditions on their shared freshwaters? This article considers the multilateral and bilateral regulatory frameworks that govern China and India’s transboundary waters in the context of global warming challenges. The findings suggest the emergence of an incomplete adaptation regulatory regime that has yet to coalesce, but which nonetheless shows some promise within a multilateral regionalism context. The hallmarks of an ideal transboundary water adaptation regulatory regime include two main components—comprehensive cooperation and basin‐wide resilience management regime. Neither of these exist in the transboundary waters shared between China and India, but there is reason for hope.