7 February 2023 – Eminent scientists today warned that the demand for water will soon outstrip supply, calling for getting the pricing of water right and making water management and conservation systems sustainable, at the start of the first of its kind science briefing to the United Nations General Assembly.
“We have breached the planetary boundaries for water for the first time in human history. We’ve altered the global water cycle,” Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Co-chair of Global Commission on the Economics of Water and Minister from Singapore, told an audience of Member States, Observers and civil society representatives at the UN Headquarters in New York.
Minister Shanmugaratnam noted that we see this increasingly around the world – with droughts and floods impacting the same regions, and in the “long-standing tragedy that doesn’t make headlines” of contaminated water. According to UN figures, one child out of five under the age of 5 dies every minute because of diarrhea.
Due to historic human mismanagement, the demand for water is expected to exceed supply by 40 per cent at the end of this decade, cautioned Mr. Shanmugaratnam, who was the first speaker of the day on the “Economies of Water”. The panel is being held less than six weeks before the UN Water Conference, the first water-focused international conference organized by the United Nations since 1977.
Possibility and Challenges
Minister Shanmugaratnam said that despite the current water crisis, humanity has the tools to put water management back on track, from data and information to scientific knowledge, technology, capabilities and finance.
The key is to organize the capabilities and resources to conserve water locally and globally, and to coordinate them with efforts to fight climate change and biodiversity loss.
“We have to get past this idea that pricing water is harmful to the poor,” he said. “It’s pricing water and having targeted subsidies that enable systems to be invested in, to extend across an entire population, and enable equity because today’s subsidy systems benefit the better off people in many societies.”
Urgently needed now is to encourage conservation, expand water systems – including delivery systems and subsidies to the poor, through targeted social or direct incentives, he said.
Among other recommendations, he spoke about international cooperation to strengthen workforce capacity, and supporting multinational and regional institutions.
Underlying these initiatives is science and data: “If we are to make science a uniting force, we have to block gaps in data,” he said.
Proposals such as tracking and verifying information on water across Member States are among the so-called “gamechangers” that were created last October in a consultation on water and sustainability convened by President Csaba Kőrösi with 1,200 scientists, representatives of the private sector and civil society.
The results were 10 gamechangers that include the creation of a science-based validation mechanism, the organization of a global water information system, and education and capacity development to bring science and data to water policy issues.
President Kőrösi is expected to present the gamechangers at the UN Water Conference in March.
Cross-cutting Nature of Water
The integral nature of water across the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and in mitigating climate change were echoed by Aromar Revi, Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, also a member of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water.
He noted the “large unrealized development and economic potential” to use water as an organizing principle to accelerate the implementation of the SDGs, as well as climate and biodiversity goals. But similarly cautioned about the trade-offs between food, water and energy. For example, potential conflict between biofuel and food production in water-scarce areas.
“They need to be brought together in each region to enable a set of transitions towards prosperity, human well-being and ecosystem health,” he said.
Pricing Water
The question of how to price water was raised by María Fernanda Espinosa, member of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water and President of the 73rd session of the General Assembly.
Ms. Espinosa recalled the principles of cooperation, sustainability and gender equality which would serve as the basis for water pricing “nice words, but the real question is how to do it in practice?”
She pointed to a maze of unequal water legislation across the continents. There are about 500 regularly mechanisms around the world related to water, two water conventions – of which neither have more than 39 signed Member States – and more than 140 Member States have requested that the UN appoints a Water Envoy.
Where does that leave us, she asked the audience: “Is there a need for a UN home for water? Is there a need for an intergovernmental space on water, which we don’t have? Is there a need for an overarching environment mechanism to achieve greater coherence and coordination among environmental multilateral agreements?”
Financing water
“The other elephants that aren’t in the room [are] private sector and multilateral finance institutes,” said Henk Ovink, Special Envoy for International Water Affairs for the Kingdom of the Netherlands, speaking about the need for a cross-sectoral approach to water management, and noting that today’s briefing was focused on Governments.
Pointing to the UN Water Conference next month, he said that “a UN conference doesn’t change the world. Water needs a home institutionally, politically and with all of us, including a closer link to the work of the General Assembly.”
Also participating was Anna Dupont, senior policy adviser from OECD’s Environment Directorate.
There was a consensus among speakers that water should be recognized as a global public good.
Some of the other topics raised included calls for blocking gaps in data and strengthening the role of multinational and regional institutions in water management.
In his opening remarks to what will be a full day of briefings by scientists and academics, the President of the General Assembly, Csaba Kőrösi said his plea to Member States is to “listen to the scientists, challenge them, ask questions, discuss, formulate the support that you expect for our negotiations here in this room.”
The President has said that his motto for the 77th session of the General Assembly is finding solutions to current global crises through solidarity, sustainability and science.
