Message from Housing and Water Minister Irfaan Ali
World Water Day 2011 is celebrated under the Theme “Urban Management: Key Issues and Priorities for Action”. The theme reflects the importance of Integrated Water Resource Management in Cities /Urban Centres. Half of humanity lives in cities where urban populations grow by two people every second. Africa and Asia would see their urban populations double by 2030.
Whilst we experience this shift in human settlement, the development of water resources cannot keep apace, and as such we have more than 141 million urban dwellers not having access to safe drinking water.
This issue is further compounded by the rapid industrialisation and climate change. These changes, risks and challenges contribute to the danger that lies ahead for future generations as water resources are over-exploited.
Growing evidence points to the significant impact climate change would have on the availability of water, through droughts and floods, as a result of climatic extremes.
We, in Guyana, the custodians of the Low Carbon Development Strategy, must ensure we safeguard and preserve our water resources. According to WWAP, only eight per cent of the world’s fresh water is suitable for domestic consumption, whilst water consumption is growing twice as fast as population increase.
The issue of water is also directly related to food production. The Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that agricultural yields would decrease by 50% by 2020, whilst by 2050 , the world’s water would have to support agricultural systems that would have to produce enough food for an additional 2.7 billion people.
The Government of Guyana has confronted the challenges of managing water resources in our urban centres, with a view to ensuring, quantitatively and qualitatively, the supply of water that matches the continuous increase in demand, as a result of urban growth, expansion and modernisation.
Over the past five years, we have invested more than $9B to improve the water systems in various urban centres.
In 2011, we will spend almost $1B to continue the improvement of water delivery in our various urban centres.
The Government of Guyana is committed to the role of ensuring equitable and sustainable management and delivery of water to all citizens. We stand in solidarity with the millions of women particularly who walk more than three miles every day to secure enough water to sustain their lives.
We too had those miserable days in the 80s and early 90s. Today the situation has changed dramatically. We must therefore safeguard these gains and ensure we never return to that disastrous period of our water history.