David Groenfeldt
Author: Water Ethics: A Values Approach to Solving the Water Crisis

"My hope for the future is that awareness about ethics will accelerate and the commitment to working with ethics, to look at ethics and values as leverage for water policy. Not just as something "out there" but as something that we’re already using. We’re using values and ethics unconsciously, and we need to make it conscious. UNESCO already did that through their ethics programme from 1997 until 2004 and then it sort of slacked and now we’re trying to bring it back. What’s different now is that there’s water integrity, there’s water cooperation; there are these others initiatives. There’s water stewardship, that’s huge for the environment. Water integrity considers the whole governance spectrum, looking at the ethics of governance, and [water] stewardship is looking at the ethics of environment, ecosystem protection in a way. And then there’s the human right to water, though ‘social’ [ethics] is not well covered.

I only have ethics hopes for the future. I really hope that the ethics concept, maybe under some different name, because people don’t feel that comfortable with [the term] ethics. But we’re using ethics all the time. I think in the same way that 20 years ago emotional intelligence became popular in psychology you’ve got the whole [economic] development spectrum, not only water but water in particular, that we need to graduate from the idea that it’s just a technical topic, or that it’s even just a social topic. There are these values that we unconsciously put into our water policy [that we need to become more aware of]. That’s my hope. "