Sustainable Sanitation in Central and Eastern Europe: Addressing the Needs of Small and Medium-Size Settlements
The GWPO Network Officer Mr. Bjorn Guterstam, accompanied by GWP CEE Chair Mr. Liviu Nicolae Popescu, presented the statement on behalf of observer organizations to ICPDR at the Ministerial Meeting on 16 February in Vienna, Austria. At the meeting, Ministers endorsed detailed actions for environmental protection in the Danube River Basin.
With support from GWP and UNDP the Kazakhstan government has drafted an IWRM plan and established river basin councils, realizing that management problems could be helped off by IWRM.
The Ethiopian Country Water Partnership and GWP Eastern Africa have implemented an IWRM pilot project in the Berki River Basin to establish a framework and to promote the application of IWRM at the catchment level.
A regional process to save the Aral Sea has resulted in an “Action Plan for the realization of the Decisions of the Presidents” of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Since 2005, GWP Caribbean and one of its Partners, the Caribbean Water and Wastewater Association (CWWA), have brought together ministers and other senior government officials every year to discuss water issues and explain the benefits of IWRM. At the last high-level session, in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, in October, these efforts bore fruit.
In December, 120 people, including members of parliamentary committees, director generals, representatives of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), other multilateral organisations, and international and local NGOs validated the Burundi IWRM Plan and demanded immediate implementation.
GWP Provincial Water Partnerships in Fujian, Hebei, Hunan and Shaanxi are key players in implementing two rural development policies – The Water Saving Society and The New Countryside Development.