Pedro Arrojo, UN Special Rapporteur for the human right to water and sanitation: Water must be a “common good accessible to all”.
“Making water management democratic, understood as a common good accessible to all, not to be appropriated by anyone and not to be treated as a commodity,” is one of the three challenges posed by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights to drinking water and sanitation, Pedro Arrojo.
Arrojo also urges “to make peace with the rivers and aquifers on which our lives depend, especially the daily lives of billions of people, and to guarantee their good condition and sustainability”.
Likewise, “to make water an argument for peace and cooperation between the peoples of the world, especially those who share transboundary basins, and not, as is currently the case, a weapon of war”.
The Doctor of Physics and Professor Emeritus at the University of Zaragoza points out that, since taking up his post as United Nations Special Rapporteur, he has insisted that “we are facing, among other things, a global water crisis, and one that is particularly paradoxical, the global water crisis on the water planet, the blue planet, with more than 2,000 million people without guaranteed access to drinking water”.
“These are extremely impoverished people who live next to polluted rivers or aquifers, often with toxic products, or whose water is monopolised by powerful actors for their economic activities,” Arrojo stressed in an interview with EFE before taking part in a round table on “Water, a common good to preserve” organised by the French Institute in Madrid.
Adapting to climate change to build resilience
He pointed out that the scientific community has been warning for several decades about the increase in average temperatures on the planet, which will lead to more intense evaporation of water in the seas and oceans, and “everything that goes up will end up going down, so the amount of water that will rain on average will be greater”.
The problem, he warns, is “the increase in climatic and pluviometric variability”, such as in the Mediterranean countries, where “dry periods and periods with more storms, droughts and heavy rainfall, such as droughts and hurricanes, are increasing in intensity and frequency”.
Faced with this reality, “we need to develop plans for adaptation to climate change that strengthen environmental and social resilience, with measures and strategies for hydrological, territorial and urban planning, with the aim of minimising the impact of these risks”.
European leadership with the Water Directive
Regarding the situation in Europe, Arrojo points out that the European Union has a legal framework in the form of the Water Framework Directive, which “marks world leadership in water management from an ecosystemic perspective, understanding water not as a simple resource to be fought or competed over, but from an ecosystemic vision, where river basins must be managed for the benefit of all and in a sustainable manner”.
This, he says, “forces us into a dynamic of shared management, of shared and cooperative responsibility rather than competition. Because what the Water Framework Directive does, for example, is to establish the obligation in each river basin to manage in a sustainable and equitable way. The ecosystem has to be in a good state, whether it is on one side of a border or the other.”
In his opinion, “this should lead us to understand that water is not infinite anywhere in the world and that it is not possible to break the sustainability of an ecosystem in order to transfer water to another ecosystem where they do not know or do not want to manage it sustainably”.
He recalled that Europe had proposed funding desalination plants and putting an end to water transfers. They end up being cheaper than this big transfer infrastructure,’ he said, adding that in places where there are fewer water resources, when there was the longest drought known in recent decades, ‘there was no water cut in Murcia or Almeria’ in Spain.
“In other words, there are solutions based on the new approach proposed by the Water Framework Directive, with the priority of guaranteeing the good ecological status of aquatic ecosystems in all basins,” he concluded.
