 For
the first time, twenty-three United Nations agencies and convention
secretariats have combined their efforts and expertise ti produce
a collective World Water Development Report,
offering a global overview of the state of the world's freswater
resources.
Setting
the scene
The
World's Water Crisis
At the beginning
of the twenty-first century, the Earth, with its diverse and abundant
life forms, including over six billion humans, is facing a serious
water crisis. All the signs suggest that it is getting worse and
will continue to do so, unless corrective action is taken. This
crisis is one of water governance, essentially caused by the ways
in which we mismanage water. But the real tragedy is the effect
it has on the everyday lives of poor people, who are blighted
by the burden of water-related disease, living in degraded and
often dangerous environments, struggling to get an education for
their children and to earn a living, and to get enough to eat.
The crisis is experienced also by the natural environment, which
is groaning under the mountain of wastes dumped onto it daily,
and from overuse and misuse, with seemingly little care for the
future consequences and future generations. In truth it is attitude
and behaviour problems that lie at the heart of the crisis. We
know most (but not all) of what the problems are and a good deal
about where they are. We have knowledge and expertise to begin
to tackle them. We have developed excellent concepts, such as
equity and sustainability. Yet inertia at leadership level, and
a world population not fully aware of the scale of the problem
(and in many cases not sufficiently empowered to do much about
it) means we fail to take the needed timely corrective actions
and put the concepts to work.
For
humanity, the poverty of a large percentage of the world's population
is both a symptom and a cause of the water crisis. Giving the
poor better access to better managed water can make a big contribution
to poverty eradication, as The World Water Development Report
(WWDR) will show. Such better management will enable us to deal
with the growing per capita scarcity of water in many parts of
the developing world.
Solving the
water crisis in its many aspects is but one of the several challenges
facing humankind as we confront life in this third millennium
and it has to be seen in that context. We have to fit the water
crisis into an overall scenario of problem-solving and conflict
resolution. As pointed out by the Commission for Sustainable Development
(CSD) in 2002:
Poverty
eradication, changing
unsustainable patterns of
production and consumption
and protecting and managing
the natural resource base of
economic and social development
are overarching objectives of,
and essential requirements for,
sustainable development.
Yet of all
the social and natural resource crises we humans face, the water
crisis is the one that lies at the heart of our survival and that
of our planet Earth.
This first
WWDR is a joint undertaking of twenty-three United Nations (UN)
agencies, and is a major initiative of the new World Water Assessment
Programme (WWAP) established in 2000, with its Secretariat in
the Paris headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific,
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This report is organized in
six main sections: a background, an evaluation of the world's
water resources, an examination of the needs for, the uses
of and the demands on water (`Challenges to Life and Well-Being'),
a scrutiny of water management (Management Challenges'), seven
representative case studies highlighting different water scenarios,
and conclusions and annexes. The two `challenges' sections are
based on the seven challenges identified at the 2nd World Water
Forum in 2000 plus a further four challenges identified in the
production of this report. The book is documented throughout with
revealing figures, tables and global maps that include country-based
information, as well as boxes illustrating lessons learned. This
Executive Summary covers the key points of the report, and for
the detailed synthesis, conclusions and recommendations, readers
are referred to its relevant sections.
Milestones
The latter part of
the twentieth century up to the present has been the era of large
world conferences, not least on water, and the sequence shall
continue as 2003 embraces not only the 3rd World Water Forum (in
Japan) but is set to be the International Year of Freshwater.
These conferences, the preparations that preceded them and the
discussions that followed, have sharpened our perceptions
of the water crisis and have broadened our understanding of the
needed responses. The Mar del Plata conference of 1977 initiated
a series of global activities in water. Of these, the International
Drinking Water and Sanitation Decade (1981-1990) brought about
a valuable extension of basic services to the poor. These experiences
have shown us, by comparison, the magnitude of the present task
of providing the huge expansion in basic water supply and sanitation
services needed today and in the years to come. The International
Conference on Water and the Environment in Dublin in 1992 set
out the four Dublin Principles that are still relevant today (Principle
1: `Fresh water is a finite and vulnerable resource, essential
to sustain life, development and the environment'; Principle 2:
`Water development and management should be based on a participatory
approach, involving users, planners and policymakers at all levels';
Principle 3: `Women play a central part in the provision, management
and safeguarding of water'; Principle 4: `Water has an economic
value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an
economic good').
The
UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992
produced Agenda 21, which with its seven programme areas for action
in freshwater, helped to mobilize change and heralded the beginning
of the still very slow evolution in water management practices.
Both of these conferences were seminal in that they placed water
at the centre of the sustainable
development debate. The 2nd World Water Forum in The Hague in
2000, and the International Conference on Freshwater in Bonn in
2001 continued this process. All of these various meetings set
targets for improvements in water management, very few of which
have been met.
However, of
all the major target-setting events of recent years, the UN Summit
of 2000, which set the
Millennium Development Goals for 2015, remains the most influential.
Among the goals set forth, the following are the most relevant
to water :
-
to halve the proportion of people living on less than 1 dollar
per day ;
-
to halve the proportion of people suffering from hunger;
- to
halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking
water ;
-
to ensure that all children, boys and girls equally, can complete
a course of primary education;
- to
halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and the other
major diseases;.
- Governing
water wisely-involving the public and the interests of all stakeholders.
All of this needs to
be achieved while protecting the environment from further degradation.
The UN recognized that these aims, which focus on poverty, education
and health, cannot be achieved without adequate and equitable
access to resources, and the most fundamental of these are water
and energy.
The Hague Ministerial
Declaration of March 2000 adopted seven challenges as the basis
for future action. These have additionally been adopted as the
basis for monitoring progress by the WWDR
:
- Meeting
basic needs —
for safe and sufficient water and sanitation ;
- Securing
the food supply —-
especially for the poor and vulnerable through the more effective
use of water ;
- Protecting
ecosystems —
ensuring their integrity via sustainable
water resource management ;
- Sharing
water resources —
promoting peaceful cooperation between different uses of water
and between concerned states, through approaches such as sustainable
river basin management;
- Managing
risks —
to provide security from
a range of waterrelated hazards ;
-
Valuing water —
to manage water in the light
of its different values (economic, social, environmental, cultural)
and to move towards pricing water to recover the costs of service
provision, taking account of equity and the needs of the poor
and vulnerable
- Governing
water wisely —
involving
the public and the interests of all stakeholders.
A
further four challenges were added to the above seven to widen
the scope of the analysis :
- Water
and industry - promoting cleaner industry with respect to water
quality and the needs of other users ;
- Water
and energy — assessing water's key role in energy production
to meet rising energy demands ;
-
Ensuring the knowledge base — so that water knowledge
becomes more universally available ;
-
Water and cities — recognizing the distinctive challenges
of an increasingly urbanized world.
It
is these eleven challenges that structure the WWDR.
Coming
up to 2002 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD),
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan identified WEHAB (Water and sanitation,
Energy, Health, Agriculture, Biodiversity) as integral to a coherent
international approach to sustainable development. Water is essential
to success in each of these focus areas. The WSSD also added the
2015 target of reducing by half the proportion of people without
sanitation.
Thus
2002/2003 is a significant staging post in humankind's progress
towards recognizing the vital importance of water to our future;
an issue that now sits at or near the top of the political agenda.
Signing
Progress : Indicators Mark the way
A
key component of the WWAP is the development of a set of indicators
for the water sector. These indicators must present the complex
phenomena of the water sector in a meaningful and understandable
way, to decision-makers as well as to the public. They must establish
benchmarks to help analyze changes in the sector in space and
time in such a way as to help decision-makers to understand the
importance of water issues, and involve them in promoting effective
water governance. Good indicators help water sector professionals
to step `outside the water box', in order to take account of the
broad social, political and economic issues affecting and affected
by water. Furthermore, targets are essential to monitor progress
towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals related to
water. Indicator
development is a complex and slow process, requiring widespread
consultation. New indicators have to be tested and modified in
the light of experience.
To
date, the WWAP has agreed upon a methodological approach to water
indicator development and has identified a range of indicators,
through recommendations by the UN agencies participating in WWAP.
A better understanding
has been gained of the problems related to indicator development:
data availability, and information scaling
and aggregation from different sources. The specific challenges
related to the production of water indicators include the slow
progress of the water sector in adapting existing earthsystems
modelling data into water resource assessments (e.g. greenhouse
warming impacts on regional water resources) and a relatively
poor understanding of how complex drainage systems function in
relation to anthropogenic challenges in comparison to a good understanding
of hydrology at the local scale. Further, the decline of measuring
stations and systems for hydrology (a widespread international
problem) limits good data acquisition. However, this decline can
be offset by the great  monitoring
opportunities offered by contemporary remote sensing capabilities
and computerized data analysis capacity. There remains however
an urgent need for a broad set of socio-economic variables to
help quantify the use of water. The conjunction of these latter
variables with the hydrographic variables can create two fundamental
quantities - the rate of water withdrawal/consumption and the
available water supply. Together these produce a valuable indicator
of relative water use and the ability of water resource systems
to provide the services we need. Large uncertainties in current
estimates of global water withdrawals complicate good assessments
of relative
water use.
Much work
is needed to collect and prepare the geophysical and socio-economic
data sets for future WWDRs. In addition
to the geography of water supply, issues of technological capacity
to provide water service, population growth, levels of environmental
protection and health services, and investments in water infrastructure
must be included in future analyses. At this point, we have made
a start on the long-term project to develop a comprehensive set
of user-friendly water indicators, which will build on the experience
and ongoing monitoring activities of Member States and the UN
agencies involved.
Summary
available at WFUCA Secretariat
for UNESCO Clubs members.
|
We need it for animals and plants, for changing colours and seasons.
However, despite the importance of water resources in our lives
and well-being, we are increasingly disrespectful of them. We
abuse them. We waste them. We pollute them, forgetting how essential
they are to our very survival. 
the International Year of Freshwater 2003. Send your information,
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