Brussels 09/03/2014 (Agence Europe) - In Barcelona on Monday, the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) held a meeting of water resource management experts from the Mediterranean region on the subject of shared resources. The UfM secretary general explained the governance of Mediterranean water resources was a regional, rather than national, matter.
The meeting was attended by professionals in the water sector around the Mediterranean, representatives of countries where pilot studies are being carried out, financial institutions and international fund providers. Two sub-projects were planned - to introduce national water information systems and a White Paper on water in the Mediterranean region.
The United Nations' Blue Plan published a report in 2012 on water supplies in the Mediterranean region, examining the situation and scenarios to take this common area of concern centre stage. The report notes that since the dawn of humanity, people living around the Mediterranean have always faced the problem of lack of water and have learned to manage water in order to survive and develop. Civilisations have prospered around the Mediterranean for millennia and have left evidence of their ability to understand water cycle mechanisms and make judicial use of this crucial resource.
The report does not paint a rosy picture of the current situation. The authors explain that these days, water is already at crisis-point in a fair number of Mediterranean countries, representing a real threat to their economic growth and their people's means of subsistence. The authors fear the situation will become worse. In order to deal with this, the Blue Plan notes the need for an approach which takes account of the complexity of the intermeshing of the various aspects of demand for water, and which demands the introduction of a suitable environment based on inter-dependent policies and an overarching legal framework including a coherent raft of incentives and regulatory measures to back these policies. (FB)