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World Water Forum ends with important commitments but vague declaration

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Published 25 March 2003 - Updated 29 January 2010
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Millenium Summit
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The Third World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan, ended on 23 March with a long list of new commitments to bring safer water and sanitation to the entire world. NGOs criticised the final declaration for its vagueness and warned about further privatisation of water services in developing countries.

The 3rd World Water Forum ended with over 100 new commitments from international organisations and countries to tackle some of the most urgent water challenges. These commitments included several global agreements such as better governance, increased capacity building, the creation of an International Water and Climate Alliance, a Virtual Water Conference website, a Global Water Initiative (by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the UN's Water and Care International). However, the final ministerial declaration remained vague and any reference to water as a basic human right (a demand from NGOs) was left out of the declaration.

The topic of water privatisation became the most controversial issues of the 3rd World Water Conference. NGOs accused the World Water Council (one of the co-organisers of the Kyoto Forum) of being an instrument of the "water mafia". They blamed the privatisation of water services for soaring water prices, which exclude poor people from of the access to safe water.

One of the agreements of the Kyoto Forum was the creation of an independent body that should help to solve local and trans-boundary conflict over water by UNESCO and the World Water Council. A recent World Water Development report pointed to the danger of wars over water access in the near future (see

EurActiv 6 March 2003). On the other hand, a proposal by French President Jacques Chirac for a global watchdog to monitor progress on the UN Millennium goals was rejected.

 

Positions: 
TheWorldwide Fund for Nature (WWF)condemned the World Water Forum for its failure to commit to a sustainable approach to ensure adequate water supply and sanitation. "The public has been badly served by their governments at this Forum, who have adopted a ministerial declaration that is a backward step from previous commitments," said Jamie Pittock, Director of WWF's Living Waters Programme. "We have to ask how credible a Forum like this is when governments do not draw on the 12,000 water specialists gathered together to identify common sense solutions to water problems, but instead continue to promote massive infrastructure as the sole solution to the world's water crisis."

A counter-summit was held in Florence, Italy, drawing around 1,400 participants from environmentalist and development NGOs. In its final declaration, thisFirst People's World Water Forumcalled for:

  • a guaranteed minimum of 40 litres a day of water for each world inhabitant by 2020;
  • the withdrawal of water services from the ongoing WTO negotiation (GATS)
  • the creation of a parliamentarians' water network to promote recovery of parliamentary sovereignty over trade negotiations.

 

Next steps: 
  • The conclusions of the World Water Forum in Kyoto will be on the agenda of the next G-8 meeting in June in Evian, France;
  • The Fourth World Water Forum will be held in Montreal, Canada, in 2006.

 

Background: 
More than 12,000 delegates from 182 countries participated in the 3rd World Water Forum in Kyoto, from 16-23 March. The participants discussed the global water challenges in light of the United Nations Millennium Summit goals of halving, by 2015, the number of people without safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

 

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