access to drinking water and sanitation is a human right essential, precondition for the realization of all other human rights. Our task as providers of this essential service is to advance in the understanding and proposition of sustainable, transgenerational, innovative and effective actions in order to promote growth and sustainable development.
This is why this year 2023 finds us being part of the 2nd. World Water Conference organized by the United Nations in NY. The first one took place in our house, Argentina, in 1977.
On this occasion, the representatives of 193 Member States will meet to announce commitments, plans, actions and best practices, related to the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda, the promise that all have safely managed water and sanitation for that anus.
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Sadly to this day, we are very far from achieving this goal. There is an urgent need to accelerate change. Water affects everyone, so it takes all of us to take action.
Water is in every order, from the symbolic to the material, from the economic to the cultural and religious. Their care is essential to ensure basic rights. Every global agenda registers water as one of the central issues to be dealt with and therefore we must understand the depth of the global debates around the sustainability of the common goods of the planet.
For us the question is very simple. Water is life. There is no doubt. He water is healthfeeding, growth and development. It is work, education, culture and beauty.
This World Water Conference organized by the United Nations that we are attending is an exceptional opportunity to share with the rest of the world the testimony and commitment of the workers and workers of the water and sanitation sector towards this essential human right.
This is our way: to exhibit a militancy, without resignation, without rest, with imagination and persistence, forging a water culture that allows facing greater challenges, through State policies that guarantee their accessibility.
There is no doubt that advancing in the challenges involved in consecrating the human right to water is essential from the Big north, to all ends of the country. Having a federal vision implies being creative in carrying out simultaneous development actions.
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I still believe that for every need there is a right. And this preaching is inexcusable if we want to eradicate poverty, guarantee development, mitigate the climate changeensure decent work, education, justice and growth.
In the encyclical Laudato Si of 2015, the Pope Francisco includes a special section that deals with the Water Question in relation to the depletion of natural resources, including water, affecting large sectors of the population. He highlights the problem of the “quality of water available to the poor” The Pope says that “access to safe drinking water is a basic, fundamental and universal human right, because it determines the survival of people, and therefore is a condition for the exercise of other human rights”
It is clear that Argentina is a federal country with wide inequalities. Therefore, differential measures are required that promote progress in the consolidation of public and State policies regarding the consecration of the human right to water and sanitation, which express consensus and are projected over time regardless of particular circumstances.
Governance in access to water is structural. That is why we support and participate in all favorable scenarios to create a law of universal access to water and sanitation services.
Water management imposes challenges, its study requires an interdisciplinary approach and constant training and updating, which allows the incorporation and development of the best technologies to achieve its sustainability over time. That is why, to face it, we have worked tirelessly to achieve something that a few years ago seemed like a dream, the University Institute of Water and Sanitationwhose objective is not only to train the workers who are and will be part of this process, but also to design and establish, from science and education, the necessary bases for the integral management of water, its governance and its regulation.
These considerations are enough to understand that the problem of water is presented as one of the most complex and important challenges of our time. Within this framework, we propose to strengthen this agenda and the commitments to which this meeting calls us through a global pact.
We have a huge challenge ahead of us: taking care of our common home, walking with everyone building substantive dialogues, promoting better workers and professionals, promoting instances of debate and knowledge management, creating or promoting thought and technologies and thinking together about the future is our challenge as a community. facing the future that our people deserve.
*The author is Secretary General of the Greater Buenos Aires Union of Sanitary Works Workers (SGBATOS)
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