World Economic Forum: Water on the Agenda

Aqua Bog Maven's Aquafornia blog alerted me to this item.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) will convene its annual meeting today in Davos, Switzerland, It will conclude on 27 January 2008.

At the meeting water will be featured heavily. A major initiative sees six leading CEOs set out a call to action in recognition of the links water has to climate change, bio-fuels, agriculture, cities, people and business; read about the WEF's water initiative and view two WEF water two reports.

J. Carl Ganter, director and co-founder of Circle of Blue (CoB) wrote about "World Economic Forum: A big week for water?" in the The Huffington Post. Here is some of what Ganter said in the article:

The annual World Economic Forum kicks off Wednesday in Davos, and already there's a buzz building about this year's emerging focus on the global freshwater crisis. The Forum hosts seven sessions on water, from market mechanisms for pricing to the tragic health consequences of poor sanitation and dirty water. (Note: I'll be reporting all week from Davos.)

In a prelude to the Forum, Klaus Schwab, its chairman, and Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman of Nestle, today published a compelling op-ed argument for rapid response and a call for "an unprecedented, high-impact public-private coalition to find ways to manage our future water needs before the crisis hits."

(Go to Ganter's post to see the full Op-Ed.)

It will be interesting to monitor the outcomes. As my friend and colleague Peter Gleick notes, we can solve many of today's water problems. "We know how," he says. "It's just not clear that we're going to make the commitment."

Will this be a week of commitments? Schwab and his colleagues seem determined to take the discussions to a higher level than before. Stay tuned.

-- J. Carl Ganter

WEF's consideration of the global water crisis is quite significant. It's obvious that water and economic vitality are intertwined, but it's the first time I can remember that water has occupied such a prominent place at a world economic meeting with the status of WEF's annual meeting.

When economic titans become involved, things happen. Let's hope that holds true in Davos.

[ See my post-WEF article]

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Comments

[Roy]

It is a shame that technological advances such as the lifestrae and the newly developed LIFESAVER Bottle can not be easily distributed into the areas where the majority of the 1 Billion people without access to clean water live. New technologies exist today that could save millions. One of those millions could be the next M. Currie. Hmmmmm?

[tyler]

would it not be possible to make a world wide water pipeline? make it so that there are monitoring stations every so often to ensure they work, and to possibly store excess water.
it would also be good that te operations of these said pipelines not be ran by just one country, but by equal partisan representation from every country so that greed not overtake, causing a whording of water.

[Michael]

Hi, Tyler.

Building a world-wide water pipeline would not only be prohibitively expensive, but it also would be very difficult to get countries to share their water. In the USA we have a hard enough time sharing water among states!

[Mike Pioneer]

Actual water crisis is really scaring and i would like to help people taking conciousness of that. I've recently discovered this website:
.
www.StopWaterCrisis.com
.
with funny and original stuff showing an image of our "home" as you have never seen before...!

[Maryrussel]

Hi Tyler,

Talkking about water, I would like you to check out the program I personally support, on the behalf of UNICEF: http://www.drink1give10.com
Thanks for your concern.
Mary