UN-Water Chair's message

Water can create peace or spark conflict. How we cooperate – or compete – over our most precious resource, will make all the difference.

Today, we face a crisis that threatens global wellbeing and stability: 2.2 billion people still live without access to safe water and even more – 3.5 billion people – without safe toilets.

This World Water Day, we must unite around water to make it a tool for peace and a catalyst for progress.

We have just six years left to meet Sustainable Development Goal 6 – water and sanitation for all by 2030.

We are dramatically off track.

We must urgently fix the water cycle. Our health and livelihoods, our food and energy, and the very ecosystem we exist within, all depend on it.

Our human rights to water and sanitation are the first line of defence against disease, disaster and destitution.

As climate change impacts and populations grow, our cooperation on water will make or break us.

By working together on water, across borders and sectors, we can provide a model for solving all our shared challenges.

Water has sustained us since the dawn of life. Now, it can lead us out of crisis. Let us work together to seize the opportunity. We have no time to lose.

Alvaro Lario

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights' message

Colleagues, Friends,

Water is our life-force.

For each and every one of us, our communities, our planet.

Refreshing, nourishing, healing.

But for over 2 billion people, accessing safe and clean water is a struggle, if not an impossibility.

And, increasingly, water challenges are intensifying tension and conflict.

A threat to peace, water security risks worsening as the triple planetary crisis continues to unfold and poor management of water persists.

On World Water Day, let us resolve to see water, instead, as a tool for peace.

Reaffirming access to safe drinking water and sanitation as human rights.

And recognising the power that water has - as such a valued and shared need - to bring people together.

We must place human rights at the centre of water governance.

Ensuring the rights of all, including women and girls, marginalized groups, and water defenders.

Empowering people and communities so that their lived experiences and insights inform the ways in which water resources and ecosystems are managed.

Governments need to accelerate action on eliminating discrimination and inequalities when it comes to access to water and sanitation.

They must bring renewed energy to the task of building sustainable cooperation on water resources between communities and neighbours.

In conflicts, civilian water infrastructure and resources must be protected, without fail.

And we need to grasp just how crucial it is to the delicate process of peacebuilding that water governance structures are developed in an inclusive way and with equality at their core.

On World Water Day, I recognise with deep gratitude the efforts of all those working tirelessly to ensure the rights to water and sanitation are realized.

Let us move together forward to shape a future where water unites rather than divides us.

Volker Türk

Acting Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity

Water has the power or create peace or provoke conflict. When there is lack of water, or lack of access to it, tensions can rise. However, by cooperating and ensuring access to clean water, we can achieve stability. To do that, we need water to be center stage in global planning.

Over two billion people are living without safely managed drinking water and roughly half of the world’s population is still experiencing severe water scarcity for at least part of the year.

Our water supply depends on water-related ecosystems, whose functioning depends on biodiversity. These ecosystems also regulate climate, reduce impacts of natural hazards, and provide habitats for fish species that feed hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, or the Biodiversity Plan, sets out the urgent actions needed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Its four gaols aim to Protect & Restore Nature, to Prosper with Nature, to Share Benefits Fairly and to Invest & Collaborate for Nature.

Each of the Plan’s 23 targets are relevant to water. Some aim to protect and restore critical habitats, reduce pollution, and minimize the impacts of invasive alien species, others ensure areas under agriculture, aquaculture, fisheries, and forestry are managed sustainably. Other targets call for the values of biodiversity – including water-related values – to be integrated into policies across all government ministries, economic sectors, and all facets of society. These actions must be taken through a gender-responsive approach, while also ensuring the full and effective participation of indigenous peoples and local communities.

The 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity will convene in Cali, Colombia in October 2024 under the theme “Peace with nature”. It is time to make peace among people and peace with the planet.

This World Water Day, let us work together to promote water for peace and peace with nature.

David Cooper