In September the Task Force presented their initial findings at World Water Week in Stockholm, which pointed to a causal relationship between water security and economic growth. The meeting in Paris provided the experts with a further opportunity to review the grey areas where attention needs to be paid, as well as do a rigorous peer review of each other’s work and build a consistency to link the individual papers of the task force.
The report will have a multidisciplinary outlook - a strong inheritance from the diversified background of the task force team; comprising economists, anthropologists, physicists and engineers.
OECD Global Forum on Environment
Coinciding with the task force meeting, the OECD held its Global Forum on Environment, with theme “New Perspectives on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus”. International experts from all 34 OECD member countries were invited, as well as non-member countries to share experiences and explore common policy issues focusing principally on the environmental dimension of sustainable development and its linkages with economic and social policies.
During this meeting, the Global Dialogue task force made a presentation on the progress status of their report, including emerging findings. OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría and GWP Chair Dr Ursula Schaefer-Preuss co-chaired this session.
Dr Schaefer-Preuss brought up the GWP national stakeholder consultations on water, which called for a dedicated global water goal on the post-2015 development agenda. This prioritization of water was also echoed in the final outcome document of the Open Working Group for the post-2015 agenda that was finalized in July.
Moving forward, Dr Schaefer-Preuss said that the water community will be called upon not just to identify the challenges of water management, but to put forward realistic, implementable pathways and models for enabling water security in the context of the broader development agenda. The hope is that the work of the Global Dialogue economic task force will provide crucial data and answers to all the questions on the interlinkages between water security and economics.
Photo: The meeting took place in Paris, France.