Special Session: Blue Peace in the Middle East (Dolmabahçe 1 Hall)

Special Session fo Blue Peace in the Middle East

From Dialogue to Investment: Unlocking Climate-Resilient Finance for Transboundary Water Cooperation: Iraq-Türkiye Experience

Transboundary water systems face a distinctive financing challenge: political complexity, coordination costs, and difficulty attributing benefits across borders deter conventional investment. Yet transboundary basins also offer significant opportunities; economies of scale, risk-sharing, and potential for transformative projects that no single country could undertake alone. This session explores how institutional cooperation frameworks and sustained dialogue can create the enabling conditions for climate investment in cooperative water management, drawing insights from the Iraq–Türkiye Joint Permanent Water Committee as a platform for advancing bilateral cooperation and enabling joint investment.

The session opens with a keynote address by H.E. Veysel Eroğlu, Türkiye’s Presidential Special Envoy for Water Affairs to Iraq, addressing the strategic importance of sustained institutional dialogue for unlocking climate-resilient investment. A moderated panel discussion will then explore how the Joint Permanent Water Committee has created conditions for advancing cooperation, including the broader strategic partnership framework and how diplomatic progress enables financing. Panellists from both countries will share insights on the committee’s role in building trust, facilitating technical cooperation, and identifying investment-ready initiatives. The discussion will also address what makes transboundary water projects bankable, how joint technical assessments reduce investment risk, and what role development partners can play in de-risking cooperative investments.

Contributing to Sub-theme 2, this session demonstrates that closing the financing gap for climate-resilient water management in shared basins requires both financial innovation and sustained institutional dialogue. Iraq–Türkiye experience, through the Joint Permanent Water Committee and the broader cooperation framework, offers transferable lessons for other bilateral relationships in the region and beyond. The outcomes will provide practical recommendations for governments and development partners seeking to scale investment in transboundary water cooperation.

Objectives and expected outcomes:

• Explore the relationship between sustained institutional dialogue and investment readiness in transboundary water systems, and how cooperation frameworks can bridge the gap between diplomatic progress and climate finance

• Present Iraq–Türkiye Joint Permanent Water Committee as a case study of how sustained institutional cooperation creates enabling conditions for joint investment

• Extract transferable lessons from Iraq-Türkiye experience for other bilateral and multilateral cooperation frameworks

• Discuss how joint technical assessments, targeted data cooperation, and shared institutional frameworks can make transboundary water projects more attractive to investment

• Develop actionable recommendations for scaling investment in shared water systems ahead of the UN 2026 Water Conference

Keywords: Climate finance, transboundary cooperation, Iraq–Türkiye Joint Permanent Water Committee, bilateral water governance, development finance.