Newsletter: December 2025
Bringing you the latest from the Alliance for Conserving Freshwater Ecosystems—community updates, insights, and opportunities to support freshwater ecosystems.
Hello and welcome to our newsletter!
As 2025 draws to a close, we’re reflecting on a transformative moment for the Alliance: our ecosystem-wide convening on October 9-10, which brought together voices from across India to chart the future of freshwater ecosystems management, conservation, and restoration, serving as a powerful reminder of what’s possible when communities, practitioners, researchers, and funders come together with shared purpose.
In this edition, we share key insights from the convening, the priorities that emerged from our collective conversations, and exciting opportunities for regional groups to join us in building a stronger, more connected movement for freshwater conservation. We’re also thrilled to announce an opening for a Co-ordinator role to help guide the Alliance into its next chapter.
New here? If you’d like some background on what the Alliance is all about, including how we’re organised, what we’re working on, and how you can get involved, check out our welcome post.
In Review: ACFWE Convening 2025
When: October 9-10, 2025
Where: IISER Kolkata
Who: 70 + participants from across India
Our October convening marked a significant milestone for the Alliance; for two days, we gathered to learn from each other, challenge our assumptions, and co-create a vision for freshwater conservation that is both ambitious and grounded in reality. We organised participants around two main tracks—Collectives and Solutions—allowing participants to dive deep into the challenges and opportunities that define our work. Here’s what emerged from those rich conversations:
+ Key insights
COLLECTIVES TRACK:
1. Collectives form through shared purpose and catalytic moments: Most collectives emerge from a combination of pre-existing relationships, shared interests, and external triggers, whether a crisis, policy shift, or environmental challenge; but what sustains them goes beyond structure: it’s the spirit of community action, driven by empathy and a shared desire to do something together.
2. Power dynamics and conflict are inevitable, but manageable: Often, power imbalances can fracture collectives if left unaddressed. Participants emphasised the need for distributed leadership, transparent decision-making, and early establishment of shared norms; democracy within collectives should be informed by evidence, not just majority opinion.
3. Sustainability depends on trust, and not just funding: While resources matter, long-term survival hinges on trust-building, clarity of purpose, and equitable systems. Collectives thrive when roles are clearly defined, power is distributed fairly, and spaces exist for vulnerability and acknowledgement of contributions.
4. Knowledge transfer and inclusivity are critical gaps: Weak intergenerational knowledge transfer, lack of representation from affected communities, and language barriers alienate stakeholders, especially those from rural areas. Collectives must actively create space for diverse voices and lived experiences.
SOLUTIONS TRACK:
1. The existing FWE framework has gaps that need to be addressed: Participants identified several missing elements in current approaches to freshwater conservation: science-backed policy and practice, community ownership in interventions, capacity building focused specifically on FWEs, better government baseline data, and a national framework for assessing freshwater bodies. The loss of traditional knowledge from freshwater communities and lack of institutional convergence across ministries working in silos were highlighted as critical barriers.
2. Interventions that get traction aren’t always contextually relevant ones: Stakeholders often tend to favour technology-based, quantifiable, visible interventions with short-term outcomes—think infrastructure projects and photo opportunities. Meanwhile, long-term ecosystem restoration, baseline assessments, and community-led approaches struggle for support.
3. Knowledge sharing must be more accessible and action-oriented: Making tools open-source, de-jargonising academic papers, creating visual communication materials, and using social media effectively can bridge the gap between research and practice. Participants called for thematic repositories, regional learning exchanges, and platforms that share both the potential and limitations of available tools.
4. The Alliance can play a connector role: Across groups, a consistent ask emerged: the Alliance should facilitate networking, create spaces for joint learning and hand-holding, bridge academia with funders and practitioners, host regional convenings, build legal and policy capacity, and maintain a repository of FWE data, research, and best practices.
+ Key priorities
The convening participants collectively identified several priorities for the Alliance to focus on in 2026:
Launch a knowledge commons: Establish an accessible repository of research, case studies, tools, and resources that can support practitioners, researchers, and communities working on freshwater conservation.
Produce a state of India’s FWEs report: Document the current status, threats, and conservation opportunities for freshwater ecosystems across India, serving as a baseline assessment as well as a rallying document for action.
Strengthen regional networks: Build capacity and connections for regional collectives across river basins, enabling peer learning and coordinated action at landscape scales.
Develop capacity on policy engagement: Create a dedicated space for policy engagement, analysis, and advocacy to ensure that freshwater conservation is integrated into key decision-making processes.
Expand funder engagement: Develop strategic partnerships with funders who understand the long-term, collaborative nature of ecosystem conservation and are willing to support flexible, adaptive approaches.
Invest in storytelling capacity: Help communities and organisations develop the skills to document and share their conservation stories in ways that inspire, inform, and influence.
+ ACFWE’s evolving structure
One of the most valuable outcomes of the convening was the honest, reflective feedback we received about how the Alliance is organised. Participants shared insights on what’s working well, where there are gaps, and how we might better align our structure with our evolving priorities.
Taking this feedback seriously, we’re re-jigging the Circles within the Alliance to better reflect our collective priorities and ways of working. We’re excited about these changes and will keep you updated on the new governance systems as they take shape in the coming months.
Connect: Building Regional Collectives
One of the most powerful ideas that emerged from the convening was the potential for regional collectives to become the heart of the Alliance’s work. Whether you’re working in a river basin, wetland complex, or coastal ecosystem, we want to support you in building strong, connected networks for conservation. Please e-mail us at alliance@freshwaterecosystems.in to start a conversation about how we can support your work.
Hiring: Co-ordinator (ACFWE)
As the Alliance grows, we need someone to help keep our wheels turning smoothly. We’re looking for a Co-ordinator who can support our diverse community of practice, facilitate collaboration across Circles, manage communications, and help translate our collective vision into coordinated action. Find out more about the role here: Job Description.
Our Picks This Month
🚰 Despite India’s abundance of water, communities in hill villages face severe water crises as springs dry up due to deforestation and climate change. Nidhi Jamwal’s investigative piece explores how rural women in Tripura spend up to a quarter of their lives fetching water, while government tap water schemes remain largely non-functional on the ground.
🗺️ Planning for water security requires working at the watershed scale, but most global delineations are too large for local community action. CoRE Stack’s pan-India micro-watershed registry breaks down landscapes into standardised units of about 1000 hectares each, making it possible for communities and practitioners to plan, monitor, and share data at meaningful scales.
🪨 From Assam’s floating chars to Goa’s ancient khazan systems, communities across India have long adapted to landscapes shaped by shifting sediment. Rhea Lopez and Aishani Goswami trace how river sediments have not only shaped civilisations but continue to influence livelihoods, architecture, and cultural practices—and what happens when human interventions disrupt these ancient rhythms.
Sand mining is reshaping our rivers, creating entirely new landforms that we're only now beginning to document. Suraj Gupta and Prof. Priyank Patel's paper examines these mining-induced features, including sand hollows, pools, and tracks, tracking their growth patterns, persistence, and ecological impacts.
Join Us
The energy and insights from our October convening showed us what’s possible when diverse voices come together around freshwater conservation. Whether you’re a researcher mapping river health, a practitioner working with communities on restoration, a funder looking to support landscape-scale change, or simply someone who cares deeply about rivers, wetlands, and the life they sustain—there’s a place for you in this collective. If you’re interested, click below:
This newsletter is a living document of our collective efforts. We encourage each of you to share ideas, feedback, and updates to help make it even more valuable; please feel free to reach out to us at alliance@freshwaterecosystems.in.
Fascinating. I'm so intrigued by how these 'Collectives' are envisioned to truely form and sustain their shared purpose across such diverse voices; it feels like such a complex system to model for long-term impact. I'm curious if there's a plan for how to continuously integrate feedback and measure the success of the solutions track beyond this initial convenning.