Water Forum to be held in Japan in December

Kalinga SENEVIRATNE

SINGAPORE: Water experts and programme specialists of international agencies met this month to plan the first Asia Pacific Water Summit (APWS) to be held in Japan in December, wants water to be put in the top bracket of development priorities by governments in the region.

The Asia Pacific Water Forum (APWF), an independent, not-for-profit, non-political network, which was officially launched in September last year at the headquarters of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila, aims to mobilise government, international donor and developments agencies and civil society groups to help achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target 10 of halving the number of people without access to clean water and improved sanitation by 2015.

“What we think is by coming together we can become a much more powerful force” says Ravi Narayanan, former chief executive of UK-based Water Aid and Vice President of APWF.

“The December summit will actually use our collective clout to try and persuade the heads of governments to give water the priority we think it needs in this region. So by using our own individual and collective energies, we can get them together in one place and tell them that progress is possible, that we have to work together that we can generate the political will” he added.

The Governing Council meeting of the APWF - whose President is the former Prime Minister of Japan Yoshiro Mori and its chairman is Singapore’s Ambassador-at-Large Professor Tommy Koh - brought together in Singapore a wide array of water and sanitations experts and development planners from the region and international agencies like UNESCO, UNHabitat, UNESCAP, UNICEF, UNDP and the FAO, as well as the ADB and civil society organizations working in the field.

Reports commissioned by the above agencies last year gave a variety of facts and figures to show why water and sanitation should be at the top of the development agenda of the region. A WHO-UNICEF report indicated that 655 million people are still without safe drinking water and 1.9 billion without access to basic sanitation in the region.

The Asia-Pacific region has accounted for 80 per cent of the world’s total deaths due to water-related disasters between 2001-2005 according to the international disasters database.

A report commissioned by ADB last year - ‘Asia Water Watch 2015’ - estimated that $8 billion a year needs to be invested on water and sanitation in the region in the coming decade to achieve the MDG 10 targets by 2015.

“Water covers all aspects of human activities. Therefore the water is not only the problem of Water Ministers. That’s our understanding and we would like the summit to result in the Head of States understanding the importance of water, and they put water as a number one issue of that country, especially the developing countries” says Hideaki Oda of the Japan Water Forum (JWF) which is a leading member of the APWF and host of the APWS.

Le-Huu Ti, Chief of the Sustainable Development and Water Resource Section of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) elieves that setting up the APWF is a good start in taking water and sanitation to the top of the development agenda in the region.