transboundary water

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

freshwater resources in the form of rivers, lakes, or aquifers that cross or form international boundaries, shared by two or more sovereign states whose competing demands and upstream-downstream relationships create potential for both cooperation and conflict; more than 300 river basins and numerous major aquifer systems are transboundary, and the management of shared water resources is among the most complex challenges in international environmental diplomacy; the Nile, the Mekong, the Indus, the Jordan, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Colorado are among the transboundary river systems subject to geopolitical tension, while the international law of transboundary waters is governed by the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention and numerous bilateral and multilateral treaties