3-5 March 2026
Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti
Venice, Palazzo Loredan

Water is the lifeblood of societies, economies, and ecosystems. In a world shaped by climate change—with growing variability, more frequent extreme events, and increasing human pressures—managing water in a sustainable and systemic way has become one of the most urgent challenges of our time.

On 3–5 March 2026, the CMCC Foundation – Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change and the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti have the pleasure of organising the international event “Water. Science and governance. Navigating safe operating spaces through research, policy, and practice”, to be held in Venice, Palazzo Loredan.

The initiative, which convenes leading voices from science, policy and practice, builds on CMCC’s renewed scientific strategy, consolidating its long-standing expertise in supporting resilience to water-driven hazards and safeguarding water resources in a changing climate.

By situating water at the core of planetary health, the Venice event will set the stage for a new era of systemic, cross-scale, and transformative water governance.

The event is open to a selected audience.

Expected Speakers

Marc Bierkens, Utrecht University; Günter Blöschl, University of  Bologna, Vienna University of Technology; Edoardo Borgomeo, University of Cambridge; Roberta Boscolo, World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Gregory W. Characklis, University of North Carolina CH, Amy E. Childress, University of Southern California; Alain Coheur, European Economic and Social Committee (EESC); Carole Dalin, Ecole normale supérieure, University College London; Ruth Meinzen-Dick, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); James S. Famiglietti, Arizona State University; Dieter Gerten, Humboldt University of Berlin, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research; Joyeeta Gupta, University of Amsterdam, Jippe Hoogeveen, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); Mateo Ivanac, European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) Water; Durk Krol, WaterEurope; Matti Kummu, Aalto University; Kaveh Madani, United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment & Health; Reed Maxwell, Princeton University; Dragana Mileusnic, The Nature Conservancy; Maria Cristina Rulli, Politecnico di Milano; Veena Srinivasan, WELL Labs; Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Stockholm University; Patrick M. Reed, Cornell University; Alex Simalabwi, Global Water Partnership (GWP).

Thematic Sessions

The agenda is structured into seven sessions, conceived to promote dialogue between representatives of the scientific and policy domains:

1. Enabling Actionable Water Intelligence. Data, Models, and Governance Interfaces
2. Defining Safe Operating Spaces for Freshwater. From Planetary Boundaries to Governance-Relevant Metrics
3. Water at the Core of the Nexus. Beyond water: Food, Agriculture, Energy, and Planetary Health
4. Compounding Pressures on Water Systems. Climate Change, Extremes, Quality, and Nature-Based Solutions
5. Making Sense of Systemic Complexity. Frameworks for Integrated and Cross-Scale Decision-Making
6. Water Governance Beyond Borders. Transboundary Management, Conflicts, and Diplomacy
7. Expanding the Water Portfolio. Opportunities and Limits of Non-Conventional Water Resources.

Background and rationale

Over the past decades, a series of systemic approaches have been proposed to deal with the complexity of water management.

The Planetary Boundaries framework has attracted unprecedented attention as an attempt to define a safe operating space for humanity. Freshwater change has been among the most debated boundaries. Early focus on surface water stores proved insufficient, highlighting the need to also account for groundwater, green water stores as critical for ecosystems and agriculture, and to define basin- and region-specific boundaries. Increasingly, freshwater must also be understood in relation to other domains, such as climate, biosphere integrity, nutrient cycles, and land system change. The challenge is both scientific and institutional: how can global boundaries be translated into measurable, accountable, and adaptable targets at the scales where governance operates?

This question of scale is crucial. While water management has historically centred on watersheds and regions, hydrological teleconnections and virtual water trade extend far beyond catchments. Bridging the gap between planetary limits and local governance requires approaches that can integrate different scales, reconcile global targets with local realities, and provide coherence across temporal horizons from the seasonal to the decadal and beyond.

From paradigm to practice
The Harvard Water Program of the 1950s and 1960s pioneered integration of engineering, economics, and social sciences. Later, Integrated Water Resources Management was promoted as a comprehensive paradigm, though difficult to operationalize. Nexus frameworks now highlight interdependencies between water, energy, food, ecosystems, and health in the context of climate trends, variability, and extremes.

These frameworks move beyond sectoral silos by explicitly focusing on synergies, trade‑offs, and feedback. They are not entirely new paradigms but operational perspectives that can help translate planetary limits into effective governance practices. They offer a way to situate water within the broader dynamics of planetary health, understood both as the health of ecosystems and the well‑being of human communities. In this context, all the different frameworks enable connections with the UN Agenda on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – and its desirable follow-up – going beyond the explicitly water-related SDGs (2, 3, 6, 14, 15) by exploring more comprehensive feedback and interactions.

Open challenges and opportunities
Yet challenges persist. Nexus approaches cannot be standardized, and different attempts exist to define their elements and boundaries. Without clear methodologies for allocation, accountability, and monitoring, boundaries risk remaining abstract and frameworks rhetorical. The opportunity, however, is transformative: aligning water governance with safe operating spaces and operationalising Nexus perspectives can foster truly systemic change. Water lies at the heart of planetary health, its resilience tightly bound to both climate and policy, and demands integrated prediction, scenario building, and decision-making capacity.

Objective of the initiative
The initiative will convene leading voices from science, policy and practice to explore the conditions under which frameworks such as Planetary Boundaries and the Nexus become really actionable.

The objectives of the three-days event are thus multiple and interconnected:

• Critically assess the robustness and actionability of Planetary Boundaries for water;
• Explore the potential of Nexus frameworks as authoritative operational tools;
• Address mismatches of scale between planetary boundaries and governance practices;
• Advance planetary health as an organising principle for water policy;
• Foster dialogue on synchronising short-term operational management with long-term transformative strategies including the intermediate scales of seasonal and decadal planning.