Viewers Tune In to Televised Water Discussions
In June 2007, USAID’s South Caucasus Water Program organized a television show to highlight regional water issues. This marks the first time that senior government officials from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia participated in a televised discussion on the status of Integrated Water Resources Management in the region and the challenges each country faces as it moves towards trilateral cooperation.
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| Senior government officials from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia came together to discuss regional water management issues |
While the USAID initiative regularly brings together key government stakeholders to facilitate transboundary water resources management, holding a televised regional conversation was a rare and special opportunity to hear each country’s views “on the record.”
There are over 200 international rivers in the world and in the vast majority of these river basins, caring for something as important as water brings countries together. In the South Caucasus, barriers to cooperation remain, but “water might make us cooperate” said Ramiz Rzayev, Head of the Administrative Division within the Ministry of Ecology in Azerbaijan. “It is better to start working on problem resolution together rather than meeting each other with partially resolved problems,” said Nino Tkhilava, Georgia’s Director of the Department for Integrated Environmental Management.
Deputy Director of Armenia’s Water Resources Management Agency, Svetlana Vardanyan, also sounded hopeful regarding the future of transboundary water resource management in the South Caucasus. “We can say that Armenia supports establishment of institutions like the Mekong River Commission in Southeast Asia,” and she went on to affirm, “three Caucasus countries can cooperate.”
The South Caucasus Water Program will capitalize on this good will as it begins building a regional water quality and quantity data-sharing system and moves forward with conducting trilateral water monitoring expeditions.
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