Despite the importance of the issue, it has been nearly half a century since a UN summit was dedicated to freshwater. Around 6,500 participants are expected at the United Nations headquarters in New York this Wednesday through Friday to reflect on this vital and misused resource. A topical issue at a time when France is entering its second year of drought, and especially as the Horn of Africa enters a sixth rainy season… with no rain. The climate crisis amplifies the consequences of the global mismanagement of the blue gold and causes tensions to flare up. “We have broken the water cycle,” complained Henk Ovink, the Dutch special envoy for water at the United Nations, in the run-up to the conference. And to add, “We’re taking too much water out of the ground, we’re polluting the water that’s left.” These ongoing problems cause disease, premature death and population displacement.
A quarter of the world’s population still has no access to drinking water
Twenty heads of state and government, along with dozens of ministers and hundreds of representatives from civil society and business, will be present in New York to try to improve global governance in the face of this crisis. Unlike health or agriculture, water does not have its own organization within the UN. But one of the seventeen global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set in 2015 affects them. This is the sixth, divided into eight objectives: access to drinking water at an affordable cost, sanitation and hygiene services for all, improving water quality, restoring ecosystems linked to water (mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, etc .) or sustainable management of the resource. This international meeting is to take stock halfway through. Because the goals of 2015 must be achieved by all states by 2030.
There’s still a long way to go. At this rate, “no goal of SDG 6 will be met,” laments Richard Connor, lead author of a report by UN-Water and Unesco released on Wednesday. In 2019, the same estimated that it would take “tripling the current level of investment, or $114 billion,” to achieve this. Even today, a quarter of the world’s population (2 billion people) has no access to drinking water, almost half (3.6 billion people) have no toilet facilities and 40% of the water bodies listed are in poor condition. “In some areas, the pace of implementation must be quadrupled or even faster,” the report calculates.
Even in mainland France, “400,000 people living in precarious housing are not connected to a drinking water or sanitation network. An even more alarming situation in the French overseas territories,” emphasize the NGOs Action against Hunger, Water Coalition and Islamic Relief France.
Bottlenecks will only get worse
That doesn’t bode well for the future. Without the mobilization of the international community, “the bottlenecks will worsen in the coming decades,” warn Unesco and UN-Water. Human pressure on global resources will increase at almost 1% per year through 2050, “under the combined effect of population growth, socioeconomic development and changing consumption patterns.” In the cities, demand is expected to increase by 80%. As a result, the number of people in metropolitan areas affected by shortages is expected to double, from 930 million in 2016 to about 2 billion people in 2050. The two institutions further note that “extreme and prolonged droughts also have increasing impacts on ecosystems and ecosystems have devastating consequences for the “plant and animal species” on which humans depend. As climate change exacerbates extreme events, many regions will alternate between increased water scarcity and torrential rains that will cause more flooding.
“There is an urgent need to establish strong international mechanisms to prevent the global water crisis from spiraling out of control. Water is our common future and it is important to act together to share it equitably and manage it sustainably,” said UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay. For his part, UN Secretary-General António Guterres is alarmed: “Vampiric overconsumption and overdevelopment, unsustainable exploitation of water resources, pollution and uncontrolled global warming are draining drop by drop of this life source of humanity.”
There is currently no binding water treaty, but states can commit to new efforts and record their promises in the Water Action Agenda, a UN platform that lists the intentions of different countries. Many NGOs hope that this summit will provide an opportunity to revise ambitions upwards. Action Against Hunger, the Water Coalition and Islamic Relief France therefore invite “President Emmanuel Macron to attend this conference in order to embody political leadership in this area and to stimulate the mobilization of the international community to organize regular international meetings on the water “. . A post of United Nations Special Envoy on Water could also be created to better address this issue at major world events.