Later in 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, dedicated a whole chapter of its concluding document, Agenda 21, to the development, management and use of water resources. It also used rights language, recommending that governments could “promote community ownership and rights to water-supply and sanitation facilities”. A decade later, the Rio +10 review conference called on states to: “Adopt policies and implement laws that guarantee well-defined and enforceable land and water-use rights and promote legal security of tenure …” (source: Plan of Implementation adopted by the World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2002).

In 2000, the Millennium Summit, involving all UN Member States, brought together many of the targets adopted at previous conferences and identified key development priorities for the 21st Century. It led to the adoption of the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals, a series of time-bound and measurable development goals and targets. It also led to the establishment of a comprehensive Millennium Project aimed at promoting and assessing the implementation of these goals and targets.

Target 7(ii) of the Millennium Development Goals refers specifically to water. The target is to:

• reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015.

The Millennium Development Goals, agreed upon by all UN member states, were ‘the product of many national, regional and international consultations that involved millions of people and represented a wide range of interests, including those of governments, civil society organizations and private sector actors’. For this reason, they are considered ‘truly global development goals that reaffirm the world’s collective commitment to improving the lives of people in poor countries’ (source: Human Development Report 2003, UNDP, New York).

In 2002, the international community reaffirmed the commitments made at previous conferences, including the Millennium Development Goals, in the Plan of Implementation adopted at the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Plan of Implementation recognises that:

‘"The provision of clean drinking water and adequate sanitation is necessary to protect human health and the environment. In this respect, we agree to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water (as outlined in the Millennium Declaration) and the proportion of people who do not have access to basic sanitation"’.

The Third World Water Forum, Kyoto, Japan, 2003, stressed that “prioritizing water issues is an urgent global requirement” but fell short of using specific rights language, although the Ministerial Declaration adopted at Kyoto did recognise the need for community-based approaches in managing water.

The conference also launched the first World Water Development Report (WWDR), part of an ongoing collaborative partnership involving many of the UN agencies aimed at assessing progress towards the attainment of previous commitments on water. The WWDR is a periodic, comprehensive review of the state of the world's freshwater resources, aimed at providing decision-makers with the tools for sustainable water use.

NEXT