World Water Week 2014 has concluded with participants jointly emphasising the importance of a water goal, as well as integration of energy and water in the upcoming UN Post-2015 Development Agenda negotiations.
The Week also concluded that water efficiency is one of the main tools in combatting poverty and hunger, with gross inefficiencies in water use highlighted as one of the main obstacles in the fight to end poverty.
“To counter the challenge of booming water demand we must manage it in a far smarter way. It concerns our lives and our livelihoods. In five years I want us all in our daily lives to be as aware of water efficiency as we are of energy efficiency today,” Torgny Holmgren, Executive Director of Stockholm International Water Institute, told the closing session.
World Water Week started with a call from some of the world’s leading water, environment and resilience scientists and experts, who said that better management of rain is the only way hunger and poverty can be eradicated. Without improved rainwater management, the future development goals currently being discussed are unrealistic, said the scientists, who include Professor Malin Falkenmark of Stockholm International Water Institute/Stockholm Resilience Centre and ProfessorJohan Rockström of Stockholm Resilience Centre.
During the Week, which broke all earlier attendance records with over 3,000 participants from more than 140 countries, water efficiency and ways to achieve it were highlighted in several sessions and discussions. Mr. Neil Macleod of eThekwini Water and Sanitation in South Africa, spoke of the necessity to invent a toilet that does not need water. “The flushing toilet belongs in the history books, in the museums,” said Mr. Macleod, stating that a non-flush toilet would cut a household’s water use by 30 per cent and allow us to extract both fuel and fertiliser that today literally is flushed down the drain.
The head of the International Energy Agency Maria van der Hoeven, spoke of the need to grow biofuels in areas that rely on rain rather than irrigation, something that would also lessen dependency on power to draw water.
“We must go from ideas to action, from goals to implementation. If we assume there will be a Sustainable Development Goal on water, we must now look at how it can be integrated with other goals and at concrete measures for implementation,” said Mr. Torgny Holmgren.
To feed into the upcoming UN member state negotiations on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, SIWI released the Stockholm Statement on Water, made up of five thematic arguments why water must not be forgotten when debating and negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals for future resilient societies; water for health, water for sustainable growth, water for agriculture, water for energy and water for climate.