Water Talk Special Edition - Prof. Asit K. Biswas “Clean Water for an Increasingly Thirsty Urban World”

26.06.2018 16:15 – 17:45

The Geneva Water Hub is proud to welcome honourable Prof Asit Biswas, co-founder of the Third World Centre for Water Management (Mexico) and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School for Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He will provide a global overview of increasing level of distrust on world's urban water supply in both developed and developing countries in terms of quality where, more and more households are becoming mini-water utilities.

While it has been accepted that water is a human right, number of people in the world that do not have access to clean water has been consistently underestimated since UN declared that the 1981-1990 period should be considered to be the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade. At the end of 1990, it was expected that every person in the world would have access to clean water. It did not happen. Millennial Development Goals were proposed to reduce significantly number of people that did not have access to clean water. It was achieved only by significant dilution of the meaning of clean water. At present 2.5–3.0 billion people do not have access to clean water that is safe to drink. Tragedies at Walkerton (Canada), Flint (USA) and Sydney (Australia) have meant that an overwhelming number of people in Western World are now NOT drinking water directly from the tap, and this number is increasing steadily. Events in Cape Town and Sao Paulo have further brought urban water availability in the world’s political agenda.