World Water Day focuses on sanitation[fr][de] 

This year's World Water Day  focuses on sanitation in accordance with the International Year of Sanitation 2008 . The goal is to speed up progress towards the UN's Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to halve, by 2015, the share of the 2.6 billion people around the world with no access to basic sanitation. Other objectives of the year are to increase awareness on hygiene promotion, water quality and wastewater treatment.

"Sanitation, human health and the environment are inextricably linked. Adequate water supply and sanitation means a clean environment and healthy people," said Ger Bergkamp, head of IUCN's Water Programme.

The union underlines that the lack of effective water treatment continues to contaminate rivers around the world, with serious efefcts on people's health. "Many rivers in developing countries and emerging economies are now polluted to the brink of their collapse," it said describing the Chinese Yangtze as 'cancerous' due to pollution from untreated agricultural and industrial waste. 

The problem is, however, not confined to developing countries. According to a UN study released on 14 March, the lack of safe drinking water affects some 100 million Europeans as well. In Eastern Europe, some 16% of the population does not have access to drinking water in their homes, while over 50% of people living in rural areas do not have access to safe water and adequate sanitation. Furthermore, almost 40 children, mostly in Eastern Europe, die every day due to a water-related disease, diarrhoea. 

Therefore, the IUCN urges the need to "seriously increase efforts to reduce the uncontrolled dumping of solid and liquid waste in rivers, and treat effluents efficiently" to stop and reverse the contamination of surface and groundwater resources. 

The 5th World Water Forum , the world's main water event strengthening global collaboration on water problems, will take place in March 2009. To prepare for the Forum a thematic and regional process has been set up. The European Water Partnership (EWP ) is steering the European regional coordination. 

The objective of this regional process is to mobilise different European actors to provide their views and input to the political process of the Forum. The programme of the 5th World Water Forum, has been divided into themes  addressing, for example, topics on climate change, sanitation, water and energy, local finance and water and food. The Forum is set to agree on a set of recommendations and commitments for action. 

The first meeting of the European Regional Process took place late February 2008. It identified the key issues in Europe which should be addressed in the Forum. These range from climate change and adaptation to debating water and energy footprint and developing future water-scenarios.Financing is also recognised as a key topic, under which issues such as privatisation, pricing strategies and trade will be addressed. In addition, water efficiency and re-use will be discussed under water science and technologies.