The Daily Summit - Instant news and comments from the World Summit on Sustainable Development: Water Archives

"Just as human ingenuity seems ready to cross previously unthinkable boundaries – changing the nature of our own and other species, for example," argues the New Statesman, "saving the planet or ensuring minimum living standards for all its inhabitants seem beyond us."

The "profound" decline of confidence in government means that there is little confidence government can achieve agreed targets. 140,000 people must be connected to a safe water supply and 240,000 to adequate sanitation every day, if the summit is to halve those without access to these services by 2015.

"Where is the money and organisation to come from to achieve such an ambition?" it asks. The private sector may be part of the answer, "but the planet is surely doomed if we always have to wait for propitious business conditions before we can save it."

Update: Daily Summit has found some slightly different figures in the WHO/UNICEF Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report. It suggests that an additional 107 million people per year, or 292,000 per day, will need to be connected to safe water and 145 million people each year, or 397,000 per day provided with sanitation if the target is to be achieved.

So even worse than the New Statesman implies?

Well, maybe not. The report puts these figures into historical context. The rate achieved in the 1990s, it says, was just over 80 million per year for water and 75 million for sanitation. So an acceleration is needed, but not the huge (i.e. unfeasible) one the New Statesman implies.

Daily Summit wonders whether the New Statesman was playing fair, by providing raw figures with no comparisons. And is this an example of the "corrosive" cynicism that John Prescott was complaining about a few pages further into the magazine?

David Steven | 12:35 PM | | Comments (0)

September 3, 2002

Your correspondent gate-crashed the VIP area at this evening's closing ceremony for the Water Dome, where some of the great and the good made speeches, while the rest of the great and the good drank wine and chatted noisily, either to each other or on their mobile phones.

Top of the bill was the Prince of Orange, who some readers may be surprised to know, is one of the world's leading advocates for water. Daily Summit's eye was caught by the Roundabout Outdoor Playpump, which uses "child play" (rather than labour) to pump water from boreholes into a 3500 litre tank for use by a whole community...

David Steven | 08:14 PM | | Comments (0)

September 1, 2002

A joint press conference between Jordan and Israel on a project to pipe water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea caught the eye this evening.

"The Dead Sea is receding one metre a year," said Roni Milo, Israeli Minister for Regional Co-operation. "We cannot wait 50 years to do something."

The Jordanian Minister of Planning, Bassem Awadallah, agreed. "This is a natural disaster in the making," he said. "We would be criminals if we did nothing about it."

He also explained that both Israel and Jordan agreed on the need to involve the Palestinians in the project, though Daily Summit surmises that the Palestinians had refused to participate in this press conference.

Afterwards, Dr Awadallah told Daily Summit that the two countries have co-operated successfully in Johannesburg to raise alarm bells about water. He also argued that Jordan has played a generally constructive role in the negotiations on the summit text, acting as a "voice of moderation" within the Arab Group.

Although Dr Awadallah is an especially engaging speaker, soundbite of the conference went to Mr Milo. Referring to Israel's work on desalination and to oft-repeated fears that water will cause conflict between states in the 21st century, he told the assembled journalists that "the price of water is now less than the cost of war."

David Steven | 09:10 PM | | Comments (0)

August 28, 2002

Targets again, this time on sanitation - which is at the heart of some heated discussions here.

Here, as Daily Summit understands it, is what they're arguing about.

The summit will adopt (if all goes to plan) two documents. First, a political declaration which is being pulled together by the South Africans and is currently shrouded in almost total mystery.

Second, an implementation plan, of which 70% or so was agreed at the summit's final preparation meeting (prepcom) at Bali.

Para II.7 in the implemenation plan reads as follows: "[Dramatically reduce]/[Halve by 2015] the proportion of people lacking access to improved sanitation."

The square brackets show an area of disagreement, with two options still on the table.

The EU, and its allies, want a clear target for this commitment - the US and its allies do not.

Both positions have been criticised. A senior NGO leader told Daily Summit that the EU was signing up to a commitment it had no intention of taking steps to meet.

A source in a European delegation, meanwhile, speculated that the US was only holding out in this area in order to have a concession it could make when the negotiations go to the wire...

David Steven | 03:00 PM | | Comments (0)

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