Will water become a source of conflict in the twenty-first century? The question is one which a number of experts are worried about and divided over. This is because the lack of water or its bad quality kills ten times more people than all wars combined. More than 1.1 billion people throughout the world are still without drinking water and 2.6 billion are not connected to a sanitary system. If the quantity of available water in the world remains constant, access to it is becoming more and more difficult, as the volume available per person has decreased from 15,000 to 5,000 cubic metres in 50 years. These figures are at the very least disquieting and underline the necessity to tackle the problem urgently and efficiently.

If the scarcity threshold is estimated at 1,000 cubic metres of water per inhabitant per year, there are a number of countries today which are already below that level. Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain have between 90 and 120 cubic metres per inhabitant per year; Saudi Arabia has 160 cubic metres; Israel has 400 cubic metres and Jordan 260 cubic metres. For more than ten years the problem of water has been pre-eminent in the Middle East. Already in 1992 the former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared: ‘The next conflict in the Near East will be over the question of water . . . Water will become a resource more precious than oil’.

All the same, in September 2000, 189 member countries of the UN signed the Millennium Declaration which listed eight essential objectives to be attained by 2015. The countries were particularly concerned to reduce by half the percentage of the world’s population not having access to water and sanitation. These ambitious aims require the participation of all parties: businesses, associations and institutes must all work together on this challenging task.