Category: Sustainable Development

-Rachel Briggs Earlier in the week several of us attended a debate on whether water supply should be private or public: Is it appropriate for private, for-profit companies to allocate a resource essential to life, or is that a role only public providers can play ethically?  The panel included Gerrard Payen, president of AquaFed, a consortium of private water providers. As he suavely spun his way...

-Lisa Bjerke & Ken Cline Past World Water Forums have reverberated with NGO and youth calls for the recognition of water as a human right. After years of campaigning the UN General Assembly declared safe, clean drinking water and sanitation a human right “essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights” on July 28, 2010.  UNGA Resolution A/RES/64/292. We thought this...

-Rachel Briggs The World Water Forum is organized by the World Water Council, an exclusive group of global water elites—it is not a United Nations process. However, a variety of groups are working to build connections between the Forum and the upcoming Rio+20 conference. Rio+20, falling twenty years after the first Earth Summit in Brazil, is a UN conference focused on Sustainable Development....

- Robin Owings After a morning full of long registration lines and stiff security screenings (whose guards carefully remove water bottles from briefcases and backpacks), attendees swarm into the Palais des Evenements for the Opening Ceremony to the World Water Forum. Young french guides dressed in color-coded suits scan in our plastic nametags and usher us inside. The auditorium is filled with...

We have just arrived in Marseilles, and I have already experienced the concept of the "elite" at this international conference. When I stepped off the plane onto the runway, I saw two ladies in matching red suits holding 6th World Water Forum signs. All the other suited men and women from the flight gathered around these World Water Forum ladies. Not wanting to miss this opportunity to receive...