The Restorative Water-Security Nexus

Against the backdrop of accelerating climate change, geopolitical instability, and mounting pressure on freshwater ecosystems, water security can no longer be addressed through adaptation, mitigation, environmental protection, and post-crisis restoration as separate legal agendas. With COP31 providing an important opportunity to strengthen the place of water within international climate governance, this paper develops the concept of a “restorative water-security nexus”, conceptualising restoration as a cross-cutting legal function connecting climate mitigation and adaptation with the protection, resilience, and ecological restoration of water systems. The nexus is operationalised through three interrelated dimensions-integrative, temporal, and scalar-and tested against Germany and the European Union, Ukraine, and Iran as deliberately contrasting case studies. These cases demonstrate how different forms of water insecurity-from regulatory fragmentation and structural scarcity to ecosystem degradation and conflict-related destruction-require distinct restorative responses while exposing common gaps across climate, water, and environmental law. The paper argues that hydro-resilience should be understood not merely as the capacity to withstand climatic shocks, but as a legally supported capacity to protect, adapt, recover, and progressively restore the ecological functions on which long-term water security depends. It concludes that common objectives for restorative water security should be combined with functionally differentiated implementation across governance levels, providing the basis for a glocal approach to hydroresilience that could inform water-related climate governance at COP31 and beyond.

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