Dr. Alexander Likhotal, President of Green Cross, said:
"Contrary to the slogan of the conference, Time for Solutions, the Ministerial Declaration fell short exactly on solutions and is devoid of any serious, concrete plan to cope with the global water crisis."
"It demonstrates that the international community needs a more effective system to manage the water challenge, not triennial talkfests that achieve very little, if anything at all."
The Forum’s official opening by French Prime Minister François Fillon, who focused on the need to change the economic system in order to resolve the water crisis, raised the expectations of all participants.
Dr. Likhotal said that as an exercise in consensus the declaration had resulted in a weak and watered down document. The declaration should have been much more ambitious and offered concrete, already recognized solutions to address the global water crisis, which includes almost 800 million people living without access to safe drinking water and 2.5 billion lacking appropriate sanitation.
The declaration had only served to state the problems and challenges, but provided no roadmap or tools to help people living in water scarcity to attain their most basic of human rights, that being access to water. Dr. Likhotal described the declaration as offering only a weak call to ‘accelerate and intensify’.
Dr. Likhotal continued:
"The outcome of this event, which has attracted thousands of people to Marseille at great financial and environmental costs, confirms what Mikhail Gorbachev said at the opening session that the ‘World Water Forum has so far failed to become a driving force for breakthrough solutions’."
"With such a declaration, there are good chances that World Water Forum 6 goes down in history – along with its predecessors – as proving to be inadequate and unable to respond to the global water and sanitation crises."
"I hope the upcoming UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil in June will provide stronger outcomes for water that will compensate for the lack of substance in the Ministerial Declaration that has been adopted in Marseille."
With the UK government demanding a 50% reduction in storm overflow spills by 2029, the era of reactive management is over. Speaking in the House of Commons on 21 July 2025, then environment secretary Steve Reed said, “This Government will cut water companies’ sewage pollution in half by the end of the decade.”
ERG, the leading supplier of odour control systems and industrial gas cleaning & thermal systems, has been awarded the coveted King’s Award for Enterprise.
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