Brasilia, 18-23 March 2018: feedback on IPEMED’s participation in the World Water Forum

 

The 8th World Water Forum that took place in Brasilia from 18 to 23 March 2018 was a unique opportunity to “promote collective awareness, encourage political commitment as well as the implementation of measures to meet water challenges at all levels [...]”.

An essential preliminary process for the Mediterranean

For IPEMED, this Forum is crucial, because it is one of the few international bodies that recognises the Mediterranean as a relevant regional space, alongside Europe, the “Arab region”, Africa, Americas and Asia-Pacific.

The Mediterranean preliminary process, led by the Mediterranean Water Institute and the Union for the Mediterranean, enabled to hear the voice of the region’s actors and to highlight the solutions implemented at the local scale on all the topics that were identified as a priority.

Appointed as coordinators of the work group on the “urban” topic, IPEMED and the MedCités network wished to take advantage of this process to highlight the know-how of cities and operators in terms of reuse of treated waste water (REUSE); as this topic was the main subject of the last United Nations report on the development of water resources.

Learning from past experiences, sharing and spreading information, taking into account the opinion of field actors... such were the objectives of the work groups that were organised in Monaco in July 2017, in Casablanca in October 2017 and in Cairo in January 2018. All the case studies that were presented were combined in a unique publication, created in partnership with the Euromed Cities Network, the International Office for Water (IOWater) and the Euro-Mediterranean Information System on Know-How in the Water Sector (EMWIS). Called “Reuse of treated waste water in the Mediterranean and impacts on territories”, this publication also benefited from the feedback of experts from the North and the South of the Mediterranean.

What actions in Brasilia?

Thanks to this preliminary work, IPEMED and its partners organised or took part in several exchanges, among which:

• Speech by Kelly ROBIN, Project Manager, in the framework of the European session on cities, on 19 March;

• Organisation of a Mediterranean session, on 20 March, called “Circular economy: REUSE in the Mediterranean and impacts on territories”;

• Presentation of our publication on Espace France on 20 March upon the invitation of the Partenariat Français sur l’Eau;

• Organisation of an interregional session, on 22 March, on the following issue “REUSE in the Africa - Mediterranean - Europe axis: territorial impacts and search for a common strategy”.

During the closing session of the regional process, the Union for the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean Water Institute called for more cooperation and horizontality among the different processes and especially among the various regions that were represented.

We must point out that, although there is a supraregional coordination for Americas and Asia-Pacific, the “Africa - Mediterranean - Europe” axis is divided between Europe, the Mediterranean, the Arab region and Africa. Undoubtedly, the next Forum, that will take place in Dakar in 3 years, will be an opportunity to build this “Water axis”.