African leaders and legal experts are being urged to treat water governance and environmental protection as urgent security and survival issues, amid growing warnings that climate change, weak regulation and environmental degradation could deepen instability across the continent.
Chairperson of the 12th Forum of the African Union Commission on International Law (AUCIL), Ambassador Jane Gasu Aheto, says Africa can no longer afford to treat international water law as a purely technical issue, insisting that the management of rivers, wetlands, forests and shared water systems is now central to peace, governance and human survival.
Speaking at the high-level forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Ambassador Aheto stressed that many of Africa’s major water bodies existed long before modern national borders were created, making cooperation among states not optional but unavoidable.
“They remind us that geography often imposes cooperation long before diplomacy names it,” she stated.
The forum, held under the theme “Challenges of Implementing International Environmental Law and Water Resources Management in Africa,” brought together legal experts, diplomats and policymakers to examine growing environmental threats facing the continent.
According to Ambassador Aheto, Africa must confront the dangerous gap between international environmental laws and the actual protection of ecosystems and communities on the ground.
“One of the central paradoxes of our time is that the growth of environmental law has not always been matched by the protection of the environment,” she warned.
“There is, in many areas, a painful distance between norm and effect.”
She cautioned that disputes over water access, environmental destruction and resource exploitation could increasingly trigger conflict if governments fail to strengthen cooperation and accountability mechanisms.
The Ghanaian diplomat also raised concerns about environmental harm caused by armed groups, extractive industries and weak regulatory systems, arguing that such threats were becoming major legal and security issues across Africa.
She noted that principles such as equitable water sharing, prevention of environmental harm, prior notification and peaceful dispute settlement were not merely legal concepts, but essential tools for preserving trust and preventing instability among neighbouring states.
“They are instruments for avoiding the conversion of scarcity into conflict,” she stressed.
Ambassador Aheto further argued that environmental law should not only focus on protecting nature from human activity, but also on protecting people from destructive forms of development that ignore ecological sustainability.
“Water, in the African legal imagination, must be governed not as an object of competition alone, but as a foundation of life, peace, dignity, and shared destiny,” she said.
Discussions at the forum covered issues including climate change, transboundary water governance, attacks on water infrastructure during conflicts, environmental justice, and the right to a healthy environment.
Participants also examined the growing role of environmental issues in international law, with Ambassador Aheto warning that environmental governance now sits at the heart of debates around peace, security and Africa’s future stability.
“Increasingly, they sit at the centre of conversations about peace, security, governance, and human survival,” she concluded.
