World water week 2010

The theme for 2010 will be "The Water Quality Challenge – Prevention, Wise Use and Abatement". It will be the second year under the niche “Water: Responding to Global Changes”. The intention is to deepen the understanding of, stimulate ideas on, and engage the water community around the challenges related to water quality.

The challenge 

Driven by demographic change and economic growth, water is increasingly withdrawn, used, reused, treated, and disposed of. Urbanisation, agriculture, industry and climate change exert mounting pressure on both the quantity and quality of our water resources. Our water resources - green and blue - face a daunting future and the costs of inaction are very high. We are confronted by a combination of escalating water scarcity, increasing demand for clean water, and worsening water quality, which severely restricts water-related human activities, affects human health, and impacts the health of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. 

The current situation and future solutions 

Many human activities that produce a good also generate pollutants, indeed every human may be seen as a source of pollutants. These pollutants often find their way into sinks such as reservoirs, wetlands and aquifers. Within the context of global changes, the 2010 World Water Week will strive to highlight the more sobering aspects of the challenge: the pollution-causing activities, the prevalent and emerging pollutants, and the scale and trends of the impacts on human and environmental health. This will help to clarify the current status and convey the urgency, magnitude and pervasiveness of the water quality problem.

Examining how some countries and regions have responded to water quality degradation in the past may shed light on how to circumvent historical trends as we move forward. Learning from the association between development and water quality degradation in the past can help to prevent patterns from re-occurring as countries develop. By learning from what has worked and not worked, we can avoid a business-as-usual approach that would delay even further the recovery of ecosystems and lead potentially to irreversible shifts.

The 2010 World Water Week is an opportunity to gather and demonstrate the experiences, technologies and resources that people are mobilising in order to deal with water quality management problems. The Week will analyse promising examples, case studies and leading-edge technologies that are in use around the world. This will draw attention to effective response measures related to pollution prevention, wise resource use and sound abatement practices and allow for an analysis of the alternatives to improve the current and future water quality problems. Ideas, examples and initiatives are sought that will stimulate the discussion. 

Integrated approaches and the human dimension

The identification of the source and level of pollution is the first step in assessing the risk that pollution poses. Pollutants have a sender and a receiver and these must also be identified as part of any approach. With this knowledge, abatement strategies can be put in place that utilise technologies. Implementation of an integrated pollution prevention and control strategy should take into account the interfaces between air, land and water. It also must address economic policies and transboundary implications that can enable or hinder effective pollution abatement. An integrated approach to water quality management can help to identify situations where a pollutant in one area can be used as a valuable resource in another. A case in point is phosphorus, which is often the cause of eutrophication, yet is also a scarce resource for which there is no substitute in food production. By reusing and recycling wastewater, gains in water use efficiency can be realised. An exploration of the connection between water quantity and quality can lead to situations where demand is met, scarcity is eased and water quality is improved.

Finally, the institutional arrangements as well as individual responses to pollution must be adequately analysed. There are various ways to prevent and mitigate pollution. The "Polluter Pays Principle" asks the sender to pay for the pollution mitigation, thereby transferring the costs to those that are responsible, and in turn stimulating new innovative solutions. Another method is "Name and Shame", where those that are found to be polluting water systems are publically singled out, with the aim to deter future recurrences. What other strategies exist to prevent and mitigate pollution? What institutional obstacles exist that may inhibit the implementation of pollution policies? Is there a role for media and the general public in facilitating decisions at all levels of government and society?

Schedule of workshops

Workshop 1: Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control 
Workshop 2: Shortcutting Historical Pollution Trends 
Workshop 3: Water Quality for Human Health 
Workshop 4: Improved Water Use Efficiency through Recycling and Reuse 
Workshop 5: Management of Groundwater Abstraction and Pollution 
Workshop 6: Minimising Land Use Based Water Pollution 
Workshop 7: Resilience, Uncertainty and Tipping Points 
Workshop 8: Origins, Pathways and Accumulation of Pollutants - An Urban Perspective