UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations (UN) has issued a report warning that the world’s water resources, which it describes as humanity’s “lifeblood”, are under rising threat due to “vampiric overconsumption and overdevelopment.”
The report was published just hours before the major summit on the water problem is set to begin on Wednesday.
The globe is “blindly travelling a dangerous path” as “unsustainable water use, pollution, and unchecked global warming are draining humanity’s lifeblood,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a foreword to the report, released hours ahead of the first major United Nations meeting on water resources in nearly half a century.
Co-hosted by the governments of the Netherlands and Tajikistan, the United Nations Water Conference would gather some 6,500 participants, including several ministers and a dozen heads of state and government, from Wednesday to Friday in New York.
Richard Connor, the report’s lead author, told AFP that the impact of the “world water crisis” would be a “matter of scenarios.”
“If nothing is done, it would be a business-as-usual scenario it would keep on being between 40% and 50% of the population of the world that doesn’t have access to sanitation, and roughly 20-25% of the world will not have access to the water supply.”
With the world population increasing daily, “in absolute numbers, there will be more and more people that do not have access to these services,” he said.
United Nations conference
At the United Nations (UN) conference, governments and actors in the private and public sectors are invited to present proposals for a so-called water action agenda to reverse the trend and help meet the development aim set in 2015 of ensuring “access to water and sanitation for all by 2030.”
The previous conference at this high level on the problem, which lacks a global treaty or a dedicated United Nations agency, was held in 1977 in Mar del Plata, Argentina.
Some observers have already voiced concerns about the scope of these commitments and the availability of funding to implement them.
“There is much to do, and time is not on our side,” said Gilbert Houngbo, chair of United Nations-Water, a forum for coordinating work on the topic.
The report, published by United Nations-Water and UNESCO, warns that “scarcity is becoming endemic” due to overconsumption and pollution, while world warming will raise seasonal water shortages in places with abundant water and those already strained.
