Background Notes

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 3^rd World Water Forum (in Japan) but is set for 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'; and

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 helped to mobilize change and heralded the beginning of the still very slow evolution in water management practices with its seven programme areas for action in freshwater. Both of these conferences were seminal in that they placed water at the centre of the sustainable development debate. The 2^nd World Water Forum in The Hague in 2000, and the International Conference on Freshwater in Bonn in 2001 continued this process. These various meetings set targets for improvements in water management, very few of which have been met.

However, of the major target-setting events of recent years, the UN Summit of 2000, which set the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015, remains the most influential. Among the goals set forth, the following are the mot 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 reduce maternal mortality by 75 per cent and under-five mortality by two thirds;
  
  
• To halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and the other major diseases; and
  
  
• To provide special assistance to children orphaned by HIV/AIDS.

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 World Water Development Report:

• 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 water-related 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 services provision, taking account of equity and the needs of the poor and vulnerable; and
  
  
• 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 industries 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; and
  
  
• Water and cities - recognizing the distinctive challenges of an increasingly urbanized world.