The German Government represented by InWEnt (capacity building international), the Arab Water Council and the Yemen Ministry of Water and Environment and at the support of the GTZ opened on July 15 a conference on water governance in the MENA region in Moevenpick hotel in Sana’a. Addresses were delivered by the InWEnt director of environment and natural resources and food, Dr. Hans Pfeifer, German ambassador Frank Marcus Mann, the Arab Water Council, Aly Shady, and the official opening by Abdul-Rahman al-Eryani, Yemen’s water minister.
In his speech, the deputy minister of water and environment Mohammed Ibrahim al-Hamdi said reason why Yemen should be focusing on water shortage is posing a threat to the future of Yemen. “The per capita quantity is less than 10% the global average of per capita water,” he said. The shortage of water remains so severe as a result of poor training of water management workers, and low financing.” The keynote presentations included Water Management to 2030 by Prof.
Asit K. Biswas, from the Third World Centre for Water Management, Mexico and a presentation on Water Management in Islam, from prof. Waleed Abdul-Rahman, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia. The representatives include top level water professionals from 8 MENA countries.
Here are a few excepts from the presentation Water Management to 2030 by Prof. Asit K. Biswas: “All our past experiences indicate that predicting the future is an extremely complex and hazardous task in any field, including water management. For example, all the forecasts of global water use up to the year 2000 made during the past fifty years have consistently proved to be far too high.
In spite of these difficulties, one forecast can be made with complete certainty: the world in the year 2030 will be vastly different from what it is today. This prognosis of course is not new in the sense that the world has changed with time. However, the changes during the next 25 years will be much more significant, extensive and wide-ranging than what have been witnessed during the past 25 years.
Among the many main driving forces that are like to contribute to these changes are rapidly evolving demographic conditions, concurrent urbanization and ruralisation, technological advances in all areas, continuation of information and communication revolution, speed and extent of globalization, improvements of human capital, and overall governance practices, intra and inter-country income distributions and changes in national and intergovernmental policies.