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President Jacob Zuma has opened the United Nations World Water Day commemoration in Durban with an impassioned plea to world leaders to increase their efforts to ensure that the billions of people around the world who do not have access to clean water supply are no longer denied this fundamental human right.
“We have to save our most precious resource, fresh water, for future generations,” Zuma said in his address to the launch of the United Nations World Water Development report, which is taking place at three day commemoration event, which will end on Friday.
The report, titled Wastewater, the untapped resource, was complied by a United Nations high-level panel on water use and is aimed at looking at new ways of ensuring that waste water, 80% of which is not recycled for use in developing countries, is utilised as a means of ensuring that the estimated 2.4 billion people worldwide who do not have access to safe water get the resource by 2030.
“We need to spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the dehumanising condition of extreme poverty,” said Zuma in his welcoming remarks opening the water summit.
Zuma said the work of the UN panel showed that access to water was interwoven with the rest of the UN’s development goals and that it would “leave nobody behind” in the bid for equitable access to water and sanitation.
The panel, co-chaired by UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres and World Bank Group president Dr Jim Yong Kim, seeks to galvanise support and speed up the implementation of the UN sustainable development goals, in particular goal six on water and sanitation.
Describing the global picture as presented in the report as “bleak”, Zuma said only 147 countries had met the sustainable development goals targets on drinking water and 95 on sanitation, while only 77 had met both.
The statistics, Zuma said, did justice to the developmental and health challenges faced by so many and giving context to how “unevenly these basis services are distributed around the world and within societies.
“Looking ahead, this unacceptable situation will only get worse, unless we join forces around the world to create equal chances for success at all levels in our race against time to secure the most precious resource of freshwater, for current and future generations,” Zuma said.
However, there was hope.
“We have the potential to create a new and more positive economic and social developmental pathway through, among others, water infrastructure investments, valuing water, catalysing change, building partnerships and international cooperation, as well as creating better human settlements and data,” he said.
After the report is presented this morning, the water summit will break into a series of commissions and which will work over several days on a political and technical plan to address the challenges outlined today.
