"The world is in a water crisis that will only grow more acute and devastating in coming years unless governments start giving higher priority to water in their development and investment plans", says William Cosgrove, Vice-President of the World Water Council. "Our discussions will have far more effect on humankind for the 21st century than the current crisis in the Middle East, or any other political problem of the day."
Over the next 20 years, the average supply of water per person is expected to drop by one third, according to the World Water Assessment Programme, issued by the United Nations.
The 3rd World Water Forum, to be held in Kyoto, Shiga and Osaka from 16-23 March, will highlight actions being taken to implement solutions to key global water problems. The Forum’s secretariat has initiated the "Water Voice" project, which aims to gather grassroots views on water problems and solutions, and which has so far elicited an estimated 30,000 messages both from individuals all over the globe who suffer from water problems as well as from others who value water resources. Another initiative, the innovative web-based programme Virtual Water Forum raised more than 160 topics and has had 5,400 participants.
The Forum will also consider some of the outstanding success stories among the 3,000 examples of water actions taken by communities and other stakeholders to address the global water crisis, collected over more than two years by the World Water Council for its new World Water Actions report. Many of these examples demonstrate that local communities implement their own solutions when governments fail to act. This supports the argument that governments should encourage bottom-up solutions.
Some 10,000 government officials, representatives of international organizations such as the World Bank, and UN organizations such as UNESCO and UNEP, along with water experts, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the media are slated to attend the meeting, numbering many more than the participants at the 2nd World Water Forum (The Hague, 2000). In a break with traditional approaches to such meetings, the organizers are asking participants to come not to debate issues, but to describe actions they have taken and make concrete commitments to future actions.
