United Nations, Mar 24 (EFE) The international community responds to this problem, according to the non-governmental organizations participating in the meeting.
Beyond the hundreds of commitments presented, these groups see in the meeting a twist in the discourse and a starting point to finally act decisively in the face of the global water crisis.
According to the United Nations, between 2,000 and 3,000 million people suffer from water shortages in the world, a problem that will worsen in the coming decades, while water pollution grows and extreme weather disasters multiply as a result of climate change.
“The good news is that people are realizing the problem,” explains Stuart Orr, from WWF, to EFE, who believes that this summit has come at a time when many are already noticing the effects of the crisis and this has allowed “galvanize” the action of the different actors.
The Conference is the first of its kind held since 1977 and, although the UN had defined it as a turning point in water management, no great global pact was sought in it, as has been done with other issues such as the climate change or ocean protection.
RAIN OF COMMITMENTS, BUT NOT BINDING
In this case, the organization chose to encourage the presentation of voluntary commitments, which will be integrated into a new Action Agenda for Water, a catalog that seeks to promote progress but is not binding.
“Obviously it is not ideal, but in many international meetings with mandatory commitments these are not met,” explains Sol Oyuela, global director of Policy and Campaigns of the British NGO WaterAid.
In the final stretch of the conference, the United Nations had already collected more than 700 commitments from governments, cities, companies or institutions, an avalanche of promises that in many cases seem scarcely concrete or relevant, since some do not even collect the money that will be needed to carry out a project.
Others, the NGOs say, are valuable and can bring about important changes, although by themselves they do not represent a true global plan.
WITHOUT AN OVERALL PLAN
“It is evident that a strategy against the water crisis does not come out of this Conference,” the Spanish activist Patricia Martín, Avaaz campaign director, told EFE, who points out that now it will be necessary to see how those commitments are solidified.
Martín, however, points out that the summit has left a “very strong position of civil society”, which has been able to articulate its main demands in a nine-point manifesto that, he assures, represents “a before and after”.
Oyuela, for his part, agrees that among the governments there is a lack of “a more global vision of priorities” and that this list of commitments is not enough.
“Beyond the plethora of commitments (…) it is necessary to ‘reset’ the agenda, generate energy and political commitment,” he explained to EFE, assuring that in New York it has been clearly seen that “something has to change and fast” and that there are signs that this is going to happen.
From WWF, for their part, they downplay the fact that there is no pact in the style of the Paris Agreement on climate, given that in the case of water, situations vary greatly from one place to another and it is not possible to set a great objective unique worldwide.
According to Orr, there are plenty of ideas and solutions to deal with the water crisis and what is needed now, above all, is to implement them and have the necessary funds.
“I hope that when we look back we see this as the moment when we stopped talking and started acting,” he says.
