United Nations (EFE) everyone has access to adequate water and sanitation.
“Everything we need to live a decent life is linked to water. Our health, food, security, habitat, economy, infrastructure and climate”, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, who together with Tajikistan is chairing the meeting, said at the opening ceremony.
The meeting, which will last until Friday, brings together governments, companies and civil organizations for the first time since 1977 to discuss global water management and takes place at a time of serious crisis over this vital resource.
According to the United Nations, between 2,000 and 3,000 million people suffer from water scarcity in the world, a problem that will worsen in the coming decades. At the same time, water pollution is growing and extreme weather disasters are multiplying as a consequence of climate change.
Three disasters: floods, droughts or heavy
“Today we have a global water crisis. Three forms of water disasters have created a human disaster: too much water takes lives, water scarcity slows down decent human development, too dirty water threatens our health and the nature of which we are a part”, summarized the president of the UN General Assembly, Csaba Körösi.
Along the same lines, the organization’s secretary general, António Guterres, insisted on the serious problems facing the entire world.
“We are draining the lifeblood of humanity through excessive consumption and unsustainable use and evaporating it through global warming. We have broken the water cycle, destroyed ecosystems and contaminated groundwater,” she warned.
At the same time, Guterres recalled, three out of four natural disasters are linked to water and almost one in four people live without access to a safe supply or drinking water.
For all these reasons, the head of the United Nations said that “revolutionary commitments” should emerge from this Conference for a new Action Agenda for Water.
Voluntary commitments
This document, which will be the main result of this summit, will be based on hundreds of commitments from the public and private sectors, some of which are already known and others that will be announced throughout this week.
These include promises in all kinds of areas, reform plans or funds that they will invest, among many other things, but they will always be voluntary, instead of a grand agreement negotiated by all parties as is usual in other conferences, For example, the fight against climate change.
Today, the UN identified four major areas in which it considers major progress essential: water management and equitable access to it, investment in water and sanitation systems, improving resilience through conservation, reuse and purification and the fight against climate change.
For environmental organizations, it is critical that the world change the way it views water and prioritize its protection while continuing to seek to ensure adequate supplies for all.
“We can respond to the worsening global water crisis, but only if we remember one of the most often forgotten facts: water doesn’t come from a pipe, it only comes from nature. The water sector will only achieve its goal of water for all if it stops ignoring nature and urgently starts restoring it,” Stuart Orr of the NGO WWF said in a statement.
lack of leaders
Despite the fact that the UN has insistently spoken of the historic nature of this Conference, only a handful of international leaders have traveled to New York to participate in it, generally leaving the representation to ministers or other lower-ranking positions.
Bolivia, Iraq, Botswana, Bosnia and Slovenia, in addition to those of the organizers the Netherlands and Tajikistan, were today the only countries that planned to intervene at the highest level, while a small group of States will do so represented by prime ministers or deputy prime ministers. .
“Our leaders are not standing up to respond to one of humanity’s greatest existential crises,” says the Spanish Patricia Martín Díaz, from the Avaaz campaign.
Although there are not many leaders, the United Nations headquarters has been filled for this occasion, with dozens of ministers, thousands of diplomats and officials and more than 6,500 representatives of civil society.