ENVIRONMENT:
Mexico to Host 4th World Water Forum
Diego Cevallos
MEXICO CITY, Mar 22 (IPS) - Millions of dollars have been invested since the 1970s in conferences and projects for ensuring universal access to clean water, but 1.2 billion people still do not have access to this vital liquid - and their numbers could reach four billion in 2025. To confront this ongoing problem, another global forum is to take place in Mexico in 2006.
It is essential to engage in a "new coordinated effort to provide water for the world," Mexico's President Vicente Fox said Monday, World Water Day, announcing that his country would host the 4th World Water Forum in March 2006.
According to the non-governmental World Water Council, the organiser of the Forums, both the lack of clean water and the lack of sewerage services - which affects 2.4 billion people worldwide - contribute to the spread of diseases that each year kill more than five million people, two million who are under five years old.
Unless action is taken now, these figures could increase six-fold in the near future, warns the World Water Council, founded in 1996 and based in Marseilles, France.
The United Nations "World Water Development Report" states that if government leaders, the private sector and international organisations do not fight the growing global water crisis, the inhabitants of many development countries will experience severe water shortages.
The theme of the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico will be "local action for the global challenge" and its purpose is to share experiences involving water distribution projects and ensuring future supplies. In the process leading up to the meeting, regional conferences will be scheduled.
"They should hold as many conferences as necessary to ensure that current and future generations have safe water, but they must also move beyond rhetoric, unkept promises, and useless expenditures that have marked many previous meetings about this natural resource," Homero Zapata, an environmental researcher at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS.
Participating in the previous forums, in Morocco in 1997, the Netherlands in 2000 and Japan in 2003, were a combined total of 30,000 people, including representatives of governments, international institutions, non-governmental organisations and environmental activists. Another 10,000 people are expected for the 2006 meet.
"All of these conferences indicate that there is growing awareness about the water problem and it is important that this continues to multiply, because that is the way to adopt concrete measures and achieve objectives," César Herrera, assistant director of planning for the Mexican government's National Water Commission.
The problems of water distribution and supply around the world have been confronted in a formal way since 1972, when the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm.
The issue has been included on the agendas of innumerable regional and global meetings since, with the most important being the forums organised by the World Water Council.
But the situation remains difficult, and is likely to remain so for years to come. In the best of cases, by the mid-21st century there will be two billion people in the world facing water shortages, but other scenarios suggest that the total could be seven billion, according to U.N. studies.
The World Water Council says that by 2025 water scarcity could affect four billion people.
The next World Water Forum will be the first to be hosted in the Americas. The organisers say the region is an example of the fact that water problems can occur even in spite of its availability.
Representing just 15 percent of the world's land mass and 8.4 percent of the global population, Latin America and the Caribbean receive 29 percent of the Earth's rainfall and hold a third of all renewable water resources.
Nevertheless, water distribution is irregular. Freshwater supplies are relatively adequate in the regions of the Gulf of Mexico, southern Brazil and the Paraná River, and the Río de la Plata of Argentina and Uruguay. But in parts of the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, the Andes and northern Brazil, there are severe water shortages.
With the exception of a handful of countries, in Latin America and the Caribbean, water historically was not an important factor in limiting social development, but the situation began to change in the past 30 years, and now water scarcity has become a major obstacle, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
>From 1970 to the beginning of this century, extraction and consumption of water doubled in the region. Demand is higher than the national average and continues to rise at a quick pace.
Today, 77 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean do not have access to potable water: 51 million live in rural areas and 26 million in cities.
Furthermore, 256 million use latrines or septic tank systems, and 100 million more do not have access to any type of sewerage system.
Water has been a motive for diplomatic tensions between the United States and Canada, the United States and Mexico, amongst the Central American countries, and between Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.
According to UNEP, another decade of growing demand, poor distribution and contamination of water resources in Latin America and the Caribbean will result in a critical situation.
But the panorama is worse in other parts of the world. Just 60 percent of the 680 million inhabitants of southern Africa have access to clean water, and in nine African countries the per capita daily consumption of water is less than 10 litres.
"It is clear that there is a need for a coordinated effort to supply water to the world, but the solutions should be found at the local level," said Fox.
(END/2004)
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