Today, we commemorate World Water Day, the annual day designated by the United Nations to raise awareness to the severe global freshwater access and quality challenges. Here in North America and abroad there are a number of events taking place in support of this year’s global theme to promote “support for safe, affordable and sustainable drinking water, sanitation and hygiene worldwide.”
It’s a day when there appears to be coordination and agreement among many of the key players on the need to advance awareness to what may very well be the dominant environmental and social issue of the 21st Century.
I am attending an event co-hosted by Water Advocates and the National Geographic Society in Washington DC, featuring Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, that brings together a broad range of stakeholders, including government, NGOs, academics, foundations and corporate representatives.
But the truth is, when you peel back some of the layers, the water issue and its many tenants become more complex, with some key ideological divides.
Perhaps the most divisive debate centers around water as a human right, and whether water should be guaranteed to all regardless of wealth, or if water is a commodity that has a price and can be traded as any other good?
Over the past two years, I have conducted broad engagement with many key stakeholders directly and indirectly occupying the water sphere. As an NGO planted firmly between civil society and the corporate sector it is our organizational mission to find common ground to forge alignment between leading brand companies and the more progressive NGOs.
As my colleague, Danna Moore, aptly articulated in her March 9th blog piece staying above the fray and seeing the systems approach can be trying with our work. Based on our conversations with a spectrum of stakeholders spanning activists to government officials to corporate experts, there are key areas where common ground can be found:
- That corporations can infringe on the basic human right to water and therefore should take a rights based approach;
- That water should have a price, not to prevent individual access, but to foster greater efficiency;
- That major improvements must be made for national water infrastructure to sustain human and economic development;
- That corporations must empower communities to have a strong, democratic voice in local water decisions;
- That as a large consumer of water, corporations must be good stewards of water within and outside of its operations and down the value chain (downstream)
Foundation funders, socially responsible investors and progressive multi-national corporations partnered up with key NGOs in voluntary initiatives are taking a step back and looking strategically at their focus on environmental issues and priorities — and rethinking the way the water issue is being approached, given the number pressing systemic challenges that are not adequately being addressed.
For one, great attention and energy must be placed on the largest and most inefficient users of water, agriculture and energy. In doing so, it is key for advocates to help make the linkage between climate change – the predominant environmental issue – and water. After all, it is through water that climate change is most tangibly and identifiably witnessed. And while this will not be easy to harness and redirect these fragmented and, at times, ideological opposed efforts towards this end, there are some strengthening undercurrents, which point to such a needed breakthrough. Foundations, SRIs and some local governments and progressive companies are ready and willing to act.
It is my hope next year at this time for World Water Day 2011 I can write about new movements of strategic actors – activist, government, corporations – working collaboratively to tackle some of the systemic gaps in the water issue.
Tags: access, climate change, freshwater, human right to water, hygiene, sanitation, supply, sustainable water use, world water day
