UN South Asia Forum on BHR 2021 also featured eye-opening side events prior to the opening plenary.

One such side event that crossed not just professional disciplines but political boundaries as well was “Improving Business and Human Rights in Transboundary River Basins in South Asia.”

Held via Zoom on Tuesday, 16 March 2021, it was organised by Oxfam’s Transboundary Rivers of South Asia (TROSA) program.

Its partners were CUTS International; UNESCO Chair on International Water Cooperation (at Uppsala University); and Asia Water and Climate Partnership (AWCP).

The session explored the relationship between business and human rights and shared water issues in some South Asian transboundary river basins.

With TROSA project manager Jyotiraj Patra as moderator, the session also sought to promote multi-stakeholder collaborative actions on this cross-cutting issue.

Speakers as introduced in UN’s program on the Sched platform were:

• Selima Ahmad, MP (Bangladesh) and president of Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry;
• Kiran Pereira, author of the book Sand Stories: Surprising Truths about the Global Sand Crisis and the Quest for Sustainable Solutions;
• Natalie Harms, programme officer on Marine Litter in the Secretariat of the Coordinating Body on the Seas of East Asia (COBSEA), administered by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in Bangkok, Thailand;
• Veena Vidyadharan, fellow of CUTS International; and
• Shristi Shakya, research associate of Policy Entrepreneurs Incorporated.

Mapping the waters

According to the program, most studies on BHR in the context of natural resources and the environment have focused on large extractive industry sectors like “mining or transnational agri-business and commodities value chain.”

Seeking to bridge a gap in BHR campaigns, the organisers and speakers shared their findings on the impacts of businesses – including small to medium, and even informal, ones – on human rights, such as the rights to water, livelihoods, and a clean environment along transboundary rivers.

TROSA and its partners use a human rights-based approach to shared waters issues.

They seek to understand how river-dependent communities’ rights to water, rivers, and other natural resources and ecosystem services are impacted by business practices and investment decisions.

Working especially with women and youth of riverine communities, the organisers explore ways to address negative impacts through evidence-informed dialogues with businesses, governments and investors.

In making their recommendations, they cite the UNGPs together with other voluntary commitments by businesses and industry associations, such as the CEO Water Mandate, Business for Nature, and the Global Commitment to New Plastics Economy.

Castles on sand

Did you know that our planet is facing a sand crisis due to unsustainable sand mining?

Quoting the UNEP (2019), speaker Kiran Pereira said,

“The scale of the challenge makes it one of the major sustainability challenges of the 21st century.”

On the one hand, sand mining – primarily related to business activities in construction, land reclamation, industry, and the energy sector – has arguably contributed to the economic development of some nation-states.

On the other hand, Pereira has documented its negative impacts on the human rights, including the rights to food and a healthy environment, of workers and riverine communities across many countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan, Laos, and India.

Citing the 2017 research findings by Heinz Schandl (CSIRO) and Fidolin Krausmann (Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt), Pereira said, “The 20th century saw a 23-fold increase in natural resources used for building” and transport infrastructure, that is, between 1900 and 2010.

The cited researchers also found that globally there are 800 billion tons of natural resource “stock” tied up in constructions, with two-thirds of them in industrialised nations.

After pointing out the problems, Pereira showed best practices from around the world that seek to mitigate sand mining’s negative impacts to human rights and the environment including:

• The Handmade School made of mud and bamboo in Bangladesh;
• The use of local, natural building materials for construction in India;
• Raw earth construction (that is, recycling or reusing unpolluted excavated earth for the construction of new districts) in Greater Paris;
• Building with WasteBasedBricks®️ in New York and Europe; and
• The City of Amsterdam’s twin goals of halving the use of new raw materials by 2030 and to achieving a “fully circular city” by 2050.

Find out more about Pereira’s silo-breaking book and advocacy on SandStories.org.