World Meteorological Day 2012

Message by Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization

International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade - 25 March

The theme of this year’s observance, “Honouring the heroes, resisters and survivors”

Message of the United Nations Secretary-General

The transatlantic slave trade was a tragedy because of slavery’s fundamental barbarism and immense scope, and because of its organized, systematic nature.  One set of human beings – the traders, owners and others who participated in and profited from this evil enterprise – elevated themselves above another, assaulting their victims’ very essence.
“I can remember”, said one former slave in recorded testimony now posted on the UN website (http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/tag/slavery/), when “they carried my father away and carried two sisters and one brother, and left me”.  This International Day was established for this woman -- and for the many millions of people whose lives and families were destroyed, and whose dignity was so brutally negated.
As a reminder for future generations of the inhumane suffering endured by the victims over a 400-year period, and as a tribute to the spirited resistance to the system, a permanent memorial is to be erected at UN Headquarters. I am proud that the United Nations will host a memorial symbolizing universal recognition of a tragedy that befell Africans and people of African descent and disgraced humankind as a whole.
In addition to remembering the crimes of the slave trade, we also use this Day to teach about the causes and consequences of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.  And we pledge to be ever vigilant about the many contemporary forms of slavery, including debt bondage, trafficking in persons, sexual exploitation, the worst forms of child labour, forced marriage and the forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.
New laws, institutions and mindsets have given us better tools for the struggle against these ills.  Yet we must also recognize that bias has increased in many parts of the world.  We see discriminatory practices gaining political, moral and even legal recognition, including through the platforms of some political parties and organizations and the dissemination through modern communication technologies of ideas based on the notion of racial superiority.
The United Nations remains firmly committed to countering such hateful acts and trends.  This is a matter of principle, in keeping with our Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Political Declaration adopted at last year’s High-level Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.  But it is also a means to an end: intolerance and discrimination are among the roots of conflicts and are major obstacles to development.
The theme of this year’s observance, “Honouring the heroes, resisters and survivors”, recognizes those who stood up against slavery when the trade was at its height, and those who stand up now to protect against its manifestations today.  On this International Day, let us all reaffirm our commitment to combating racism and building societies based on justice, equality and solidarity.

15 March 2012

Secretary-General SG/SM/14163 ENV/DEV/1262 OBV/1075

Department of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York

Unwise Use of Water Will Result in Persisting Hunger, Drought, Political Instability, Secretary General Warns in Observance Message

Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message for World Water Day, to be observed on 22 March:

Over the coming decades, feeding a growing global population and ensuring food and nutrition security for all will depend on increasing food production.  This, in turn, means ensuring the sustainable use of our most critical finite resource — water.

The theme of this year’s World Water Day is water and food security.  Agriculture is by far the main user of freshwater.  Unless we increase our capacity to use water wisely in agriculture, we will fail to end hunger and we will open the door to a range of other ills, including drought, famine and political instability.

In many parts of the world, water scarcity is increasing and rates of growth in agricultural production have been slowing.  At the same time, climate change is exacerbating risk and unpredictability for farmers, especially for poor farmers in low-income countries who are the most vulnerable and the least able to adapt.

These interlinked challenges are increasing competition between communities and countries for scarce water resources, aggravating old security dilemmas, creating new ones and hampering the achievement of the fundamental human rights to food, water and sanitation.  With nearly 1 billion people hungry and some 800 million still lacking a safe supply of freshwater, there is much we must do to strengthen the foundations of local, national, and global stability.

Guaranteeing sustainable food and water security for all will require the full engagement of all sectors and actors.  It will entail transferring appropriate water technologies, empowering small food producers and conserving essential ecosystem services.  It will require policies that promote water rights for all, stronger regulatory capacity and gender equality.  Investments in water infrastructure, rural development and water resource management will be essential.

We should all be encouraged by the renewed political interest in food security, as evidenced by the high priority given to this issue by the agendas of the G-8 and G-20, the emphasis on the nexus of food, water and energy in the report of my Global Sustainability Panel, and the growing number of countries pledging to Scale Up Nutrition.

On this World Water Day, I urge all partners to fully use the opportunity provided by the “ Rio+20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.  In Rio, we need to connect the dots between water security and food and nutrition security, in the context of a green economy.  Water will play a central role in creating the future we want.

Ensuring access to water for agriculture vital for sustainable future – UN

22 March 2012 – Ensuring universal access to water and using it wisely in agriculture is essential to end famine, drought and political instability, United Nations officials stressed today, adding that countries must strive to provide this vital source to all their citizens to achieve a sustainable future.

“Over the coming decades, feeding a growing global population and ensuring food and nutrition security for all will depend on increasing food production. This, in turn, means ensuring the sustainable use of our most critical finite source – water,” said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his message marking World Water Day.
The theme of this year’s observance is water and food security. Currently, nearly one billion people suffer from hunger and some 800 million still lack a safe supply of freshwater.
In his message, Mr. Ban emphasized that guaranteeing food and water for all will require countries’ full engagement.
“It will require policies that promote water rights for all, stronger regulatory capacity and gender equality,” Mr. Ban said. “Investments in water infrastructure, rural development and water resource management will be essential.”
A Senior Technical Adviser for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Rome, Rudolph Cleveringa, echoed Mr. Ban’s remarks, stressing that securing water access is particularly important in rural communities.
“For smallholder farmers in developing countries, water and land cannot be treated as separate issues. If we are to reduce poverty in rural areas, we must develop a holistic approach to focus on water in all of its contributions to development such as in areas of health and agriculture,” he said.
According to IFAD, approximately 70 per cent of the world’s water resources are used for agriculture and by 2025 two-thirds of the population could struggle to get access to this resource.
Meanwhile, a UN water and sanitation expert, Catarina de Albuquerque, urged countries to address the right to water during the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) taking place in Rio de Janeiro in June, in which world leaders as well as members from the private sector and civil society will come together to discuss ways to encourage green economies and eradicate poverty.
In particular, Ms. Albuquerque called for all countries to recognize the right to water and sanitation for all, stressing that countries cannot go back on their decision to support this right.
“Some States, including Canada and the United Kingdom, are apparently proposing the removal of an explicit reference to the right to water and sanitation for all from the first draft of the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development outcome document,” Ms. Albuquerque warned. “We should be marking World Water Day with progress, not debating semantics and certainly not back-tracking on these issues.”
To mark the day, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is hosting a series of events at its headquarters in Rome, Italy, which include discussions on improving water management, reducing food and water waste, and building up communities’ resilience to climate change.

Press Conference

Department of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York

Press Conference on Occasion of World Water Day

An integrated approach to water management was crucial in putting the world on the path to a sustainable future, experts said today at a Headquarters press conference to mark the occasion of World Water Day.

The fact that the Millennium Development Goals on drinking water had been met was evidence that other related targets could also be met if the international community pulled together, said Rolf Luyendijk, Senior Statistics and Monitoring Specialist with the Statistics and Monitoring Section of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

He said UNICEF was currently working to mitigate the food and water crisis in Africa’s Sahel region, recalling that a similar crisis that had started in the Horn of Africa in 2001 was continuing, with millions of people in Somalia at risk of starvation.  As for the Sahel, the Fund estimated that 5.4 million people were at risk in Niger, where about a million children suffered from under-nutrition.  People were streaming into feeding centres because the rains had not fallen, crops had not been planted and food prices had soared.

Water, sanitation, food and hygiene were inextricably linked, he noted, adding that the next billion of the world’s population were all children under the age of 10 years.  They needed access to water in order to lead “a dignified and healthy life”, said Mr. Luyendijk, who was accompanied by Ania Grobicki, Executive Secretary of the Global Water Partnership, Ana Persic, Science Programme Specialist at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and Csaba Körösi, Permanent Representative of Hungary to the United Nations.

Dr. Grobicki described water as “a global issue and a global risk”, pointing out that in addition to its domestic uses, it was essential for agriculture and industry.  Water was the “engine of the economy” and also critically important in supporting biodiversity.  Noting that the Millennium Development Goal on food security would not be met this year, she said agriculture took the lion’s share of water in most countries around the world, from 70 to 90 per cent.  There was also the question of cross-border food trading, she said.

Wastewater management was a tremendous opportunity and challenge in agriculture, she continued, recalling that the United Nations Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation had called for “a global vision for waste water management”.  It was also important to increase water productivity — producing more crops for every drop of water used — she said, calling upon Governments to recommit themselves to an integrated approach to solving the world’s water problems while coming up with financial strategies to implement that approach.

Ms. Persic, highlighting key findings and messages from the World Water Development Report, said it was crucial to see water as the link between the agriculture sector, energy production and human consumption.  The world’s fast-growing urban population was responsible for increasing human consumption of water, she said, adding that 1 billion households relied on groundwater, an “over-used and non-renewable” resource, and that climate change exerted an important additional pressure.  Beyond access, there was also the question of water quality in a time of pollution, she said.

Mr. Körösi, who was helping to facilitate water-related negotiations as Member States prepared for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), said that if there was a decision to create sustainable development goals at that event, water would be high on the list.  He stresesed the importance of bringing the debate on water down “from the high-flown to the down-to-earth”.

He said that a series of workshops on water-related issues had focused on issues including risk management and the impact of human activities.  Strong cooperation would be needed at the local, regional, and national levels.  He hoped that the negotiations between Member States could be “boiled down to very simple solutions”.

In response to a question about the “worst-case” water scenarios, Dr. Grobicki emphasized that there were far more instances of water cooperation than otherwise.  The more water scarcity hit, the greater incentive there was to invest in water security.

Mr. Körösi added that agreements on access to water would be necessary, but agreements on the quality of water that was returned to nature would be equally crucial.  “Imagine a river that flows through 20 countries,” he said.  If one country polluted it, all the downstream countries would be affected in terms of food, health and social structure.  That was all the more reason for “a good understanding of the integrated approach”, he added.

Water challenges around the globe

U.S. Water Partnership

The U.S. Water Partnership (USWP) is a U.S.-based public-private partnership (PPP) established to unite American expertise, knowledge, and resources, and mobilize those assets to address water challenges around the globe, especially in the developing world. Fact Sheet»

Remarks in Honor of World Water Day 2012

Remarks Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State George C. Marshall Auditorium  , WWD 2012

Washington, DC
March 22, 2012

Thank you so much, and welcome, everyone, to the State Department for this World Water Day event. I am delighted to have this opportunity with so many partners and colleagues who care deeply about this essential issue to mark this day, and to talk further about what we can do together.

I want to thank the congressman for his very kind remarks, but much more than that, his longstanding commitment to this and so many other important issues. I really admire the way that he does take on issues and stay with them. Sometimes it’s hard to do that in the Congress because you’re being buffeted from so many different directions. But it’s only through persistence and perseverance that you can get things done. And the Paul Simon Water For The Poor Act is a great accomplishment.

And I also want to thank Under Secretary Maria Otero for her tremendous leadership. When we decided we wanted to focus on water because it cut across so many of the concerns that we had in dealing with the crisis of the moment, we needed a really great commitment from a proven leader, and she has done just that committed leadership on this issue. And of course, Assistant Secretary Kerri-Ann Jones, who I literally recruited while she was in the water, and has been just a tremendous champion of the issues within the Bureau of Oceans, Environment, and Science, along with her great team, USAID, which was part of the partnership from the very beginning, and deeply committed as well.

We are all here because we know ensuring that everyone has the clean water they need to live and thrive has to be a high priority for all of us. When I spoke on World Water Day two years ago, I talked about how water is clearly integral to many of our foreign policy goals. When nearly 2 million people die each year from preventable waterborne disease, clean water is critical if we’re going to be talking about achieving our global health goals. Something as simple as better access to water and sanitation can improve the quality of life and reduce the disease burden for billions of people. When women and girls don’t have to spend 200 million hours a day, as Earl just said, seeking water, maybe they can go to school, maybe they can have more opportunities to help bring income in to the family. Reliable access to water is essential for feeding the hungry, running the industries that promote jobs, generating the energy that fuels national growth, and certainly, it is central when we think about how climate change will affect future generations.

Now, we are pursuing this not only because we care about it around the world; we care about it here at home. We’ve had increasing problems meeting our own needs in the Desert Southwest or managing floods in the East. No country anywhere, no matter how developed, is immune to the challenges that we face. So we’ve been working steadily across multiple fronts to make progress on our comprehensive complex water agenda, and I’d like to update you today.

Since I signed our government-wide agreement with the World Bank last year, we have identified 30 activities where various U.S. agencies can work more closely with the World Bank and with each other to improve our individual efforts on water security. USAID and NASA are working together using earth science and satellite technology to analyze water security and other water-related challenges in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. We’re working with the international community on the Sanitation and Water for All Partnership, which is designed to help countries where access to water remains a critical barrier to growth, to build political commitment and capacity to begin solving their own problems.

And USAID recently launched the WASH – W-A-S-H – the WASH for Life partnership with the Gates Foundation. It’s a very fitting acronym – Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, or WASH. This project will identify, test, and scale up evidence-based approaches for delivering these services to people in some of the poorest regions of the world.

So let’s look at one example about how all of this comes together. In Haiti, you know the terrible problems that occurred because of the cholera epidemic, which was imported from the outside. Well, USAID’s programs are helping to prevent the further spread of waterborne diseases such as cholera. We are supporting a range of programs to improve health, from increasing access to safe drinking water, to promoting regular hand-washing and other practices. We are also helping farmers use water more efficiently, protecting Haiti’s watersheds, a critical source of water, and rehabilitating irrigation systems that provide water to as much as 15,000 hectares of crops so that Haiti can once again become a regional agricultural exporter. We have planted thousands of trees to reinforce riverbanks and to help prevent flooding, which has saved lives and protected property throughout Haiti’s productive plains.

Now, this kind of work and that of so many other examples I could give you is paying off. Last week, the UN announced that we met the Millennium Development Goal to cut in half the proportion of people living without access to safe drinking water, and we reached it almost four years ahead of schedule. There aren’t many of the MDG’s that we’ve actually achieved, so the fact that we’ve achieved this one is, I think, not only good in and of itself, but should serve as a spur on others as well. We know it not only translates into better lives, but it proves the international community, when focused and working together, can actually achieve goals that are set.

But with the news of this accomplishment, we’re reminded about how much more we have yet to do. At this rate, nearly 700 million people will lack access to safe drinking water in 2015. And many countries still are not making enough progress reaching their most vulnerable populations, and those conditions will only deteriorate as populations grow and crowd into already overcrowded cities without adequate infrastructure.

Last year, I called on the intelligence community to conduct a global assessment of the impact water could have and was having on our national security. Today, the National Intelligence Council released the unclassified version of its report on Global Water Security. You can go online, read it for yourself, see how imperative clean water and access to water is to future peace, security, and prosperity, globally. I think it’s fair to say the intelligence community’s findings are sobering.

As the world’s population continues to grow, demand for water will go up, but our freshwater supplies will not keep pace. In some places, the water tables are already more depleted than we had thought. In northern India, for example, over-extraction of groundwater could impact food security and access to water for millions of people. Some countries will face severe shortages within decades or even sooner. And some hydrologists predict that many wells in Yemen will run dry in as little as 10 years.

The assessment also highlights the potential threat that water resources could be targeted by terrorists or manipulated as a political tool. These difficulties will all increase the risk of instability within and between states. Within states, they could cause some states to fail outright. And between and among states, you could see regional conflicts among states that share water basins be exacerbated and even lead to violence. So these threats are real and they do raise serious security concerns.

This assessment is a landmark document that puts water security in its rightful place as part of national security, and I’d like to thank everyone involved in helping to produce it. It is also a call for American leadership in this area. Our domestic experiences with water and our technical expertise are valued around the world. And as countries become more water stressed or nations face water-related crises, they are increasingly turning to the United States for assistance. We hear this all the time at embassies everywhere. Local leaders meet with our ambassadors and ask, “What did you do in the United States? How did you do it? Can you help us?”

Well, today, we are launching a new public-private partnership to help answer that call for leadership and to expand the impact of America’s work on water. The U.S. Water Partnership exemplifies the unity of effort and expertise we will need to address these challenges over the coming years, and it advances our work in three critical ways.

First, it brings together a diverse range of partners from the private sector, the philanthropic community, the NGOs, academics, experts, and government. This approach will help catalyze new opportunities for cooperation. For example, if Coca-Cola has the best data on available water supplies, and the Army Corps of Engineers has the capacity to advise on how to build water delivery systems, and the Nature Conservancy knows how to minimize the disruption to the environment, then we want everybody sharing information and delivering clean water in a sustainable way to communities in need.

Breaking down silos, barriers, obstacles has been one of my goals as Secretary of State, within our own government, with multilateral institutions, and between and among governments. Bringing people with varied water experience and expertise together will also force us to look for system-wide solutions. Now, you can’t work on water as a health concern independently from water as an agricultural concern, and water that is needed for agriculture may also be water that is needed for energy production. So we need to be looking for interventions that work on multiple levels simultaneously and help us focus on systemic responses.

Now, of course, while water is a global problem, solutions happen at the local level. So the second goal of the U.S. Water Partnership is to make all this American knowledge and expertise accessible. The U.S. Water Web Portal will provide a single entry point to our data, best practices, and training to help empower people taking on these problems in their own communities. And it will help build international support for American approaches, technologies, companies, government agencies, our whole universe of experts standing ready to assist.

Finally, because this is a public-private venture, the U.S. Water Partnership will not depend on any one government agency or any one private organization to keep it going. The State Department is proud to be a founding partner, but we also hope that the partnership will spawn many new projects that may or may not involve us. The Water Partnership has built-in flexibility to address the world’s changing water needs and to continue our work to find sustainable solutions.

In brief, we believe this will help map out our route to a more water secure world: a world where no one dies from water-related diseases; where water does not impede social or economic development; and where no war is ever fought over water.

I have said before that no resource defines this planet more than water. I mean, look at those great pictures from the Hubble telescope, or even just look at a globe, and you see all that blue. And we know how absolutely essential it is to life. We’re still wondering whether did Mars ever have water? What do those craters on other planets actually mean? And it is though not only life-sustaining, it is – and we have argued this from the beginning of our involvement and commitment – an essential ingredient of global peace, stability, and security.

We have been working the diplomatic level with a number of countries to bring into higher relief some of the water challenges they are, or will be, facing. Back in 2009, we began something called the Lower Mekong Initiative, where we brought together countries that are in the Lower Mekong region, and began to meet with them and talk with them and provide expertise to them, and create linkage with the Mississippi River Basin in order to raise understanding and visibility about these issues. And it’s been fascinating to watch over the three years that we’ve met – we’ll have a fourth meeting at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Cambodia in July – how the level of interest has grown and the willingness to tackle some of the hard problems and also the political will to raise some tough questions with others – other nations through which the Mekong travels.

This is not something that will immediately, directly affect the United States. We are a long way away after all. But it will affect the climate; it will affect the quality of life; it will affect the tensions among and between nations, which could very well then have follow-on effects that we would have to respond to. So there’s a lot that is connected that may not appear so at first glance, but which a little tiny bit of digging and reflection illustrates how important this issue is for each and every one of us.

So we think it actually is our duty and responsibility to make sure that this water issue stays at the very top of America’s foreign policy and national security agenda. We’ve proven we can make progress, but we know we have a lot more work to do. So I hope on this World Water Day we rededicate ourselves to that hard work and to being innovative and creative, using the new tools that we’re announcing today to bring people together in our own country, across our own government, and all the constituencies that care about water, working closely with leaders like the congressmen in the Congress, to continue to be on the cutting edge of helping to solve the problems that are posed to so many millions of people everywhere in the world, including here at home.

It’s exciting that it’s not only about water. It is about security, peace, and prosperity as well. Thank you all very much. (Applause.)



PRN: 2012/433