London, UK: In a report’s foreword, United Nations Secretary-General Mr. Antonio Guterres warned that the world is “blindly travelling a dangerous path” as “unsustainable water use, pollution, and unchecked global warming are draining humanity’s lifeblood.” The report was released hours before the first significant UN meeting on water resources in nearly 50 years.
The UN warned in the report released hours before a major summit on the issue was scheduled to start on 22nd March 2023 that water, the “lifeblood” of humanity, is increasingly in danger owing to “vampiric overconsumption and overdevelopment.”
The UN Water Conference, which is being co-hosted by the governments of Tajikistan and the Netherlands, will draw around 6,500 people to New York from 22nd March 2023 through, including 100 ministers and 12 heads of state and government.
To halt this trend and contribute to achieving the development objective of “access to water and sanitation for all by 2030,” announced in 2015, governments and players from the public and private sectors are invited to offer suggestions at the UN conference.
The most recent conference on this important topic, which is not the subject of a worldwide agreement or a separate UN body, took place in 1977 in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Concerns regarding the size of these pledges and the availability of resources to carry them out have already been expressed by some commentators.
Mr. Gilbert Houngbo, chair of UN-Water, a forum for coordinating efforts on the subject, declared that there was “much to do” and that time was not on their side. According to the report, which was released by UN-Water and UNESCO, “scarcity is becoming endemic” as a result of overuse and pollution, and global warming will exacerbate seasonal water shortages in both water-rich and water-stressed regions.