Global water experts meet at McMaster
[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/UNlogo.jpg” caption=”More than two dozen leading United Nations water experts have convened at McMaster Innovation Park through Feb. 4 to plan fresh strategy for a coordinated approach to the global water crisis that increasingly threatens both human health and international security.”]
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More than two dozen leading United Nations water experts have convened at McMaster Innovation Park through Feb. 4 to plan fresh strategy for a coordinated approach to the global water crisis that increasingly threatens both human health and international security.
At its first-ever meeting in Canada, the group known as UN-Water will also formalize international ceremonies to mark World Water Day 2010 (March 22) and help set both direction and UN agency contributions for the next triennial World Water Development Report in 2012.
The meeting is being convened by UN-Water's new Chair, Zafar Adeel, director of the United Nations University's McMaster-based Institute for Water, Environment & Health.
UN-Water was created in 2003 to coordinate the global water-related work of 26 relevant UN agencies and to interact with 17 major partners such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the World Conservation Union (IUCN).
"This meeting of UN agencies comes at a crucial time, just two months after the UN's historic Copenhagen conference on climate change and four months before leaders of the G8 and G20 nations meet in Ontario," says Adeel. "The global importance of water issues cannot be overstated. Virtually all climate change impacts are expressed through water in one form or another, including more severe storms and extreme floods, and rapidly disappearing glaciers, often called 'Earth's water towers'."
Adeel says that while science can predict the average impact of climate change with relative confidence, its implications are far less clear at the level of countries or even world regions, especially with respect to future precipitation patterns.
He predicts that helping policy makers navigate questions surrounding local and regional water-related impacts of climate change will assume growing importance for UN-Water members and partners in years to come.
UN-Water is an inter-agency mechanism established by the United Nations High Level Committee on Programmes to foster synergies and information-sharing between UN agencies and outside partners.
UNU-INWEH was established in 1996 to strengthen water management capacity, particularly of developing countries, and to provide on-the-ground project support. With core funding from the Government of Canada through CIDA, it is hosted by McMaster University.
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