PRESS BRIEFING BY UN-HABITAT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Press briefing by un-habitat executive director

Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) at a Headquarters press briefing this morning announced the 2003 Habitat Scroll of Honour Awards and introduced two of the recipients.

The Scroll of Honour is the highest United Nations system award for people who had made substantial contributions in human settlements development.  Today, Ms. Tibaijuka introduced Nasreen Mustafa Sideek Berwari, Minister for Municipalities and Public Works on Iraq’s Governing Council, who was recognized for her commitment to the welfare of displaced and vulnerable persons in northern Iraq, and Margaret Catley-Carlson, Chair of the Global Water Partnership, and a former Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), who was honoured for her contribution to placing water and sanitation on the global political agenda.

Ms. Berwari recalled that seven years ago this month, UN-Habitat had appointed her to head one of three offices it had opened in Iraqi Kurdistan to address the needs of more than 4,000 destroyed communities, including towns of more than 30,000 people.  She was receiving the UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour on behalf of all those who had worked closely with her and who had supported the work at the community level.  It was also received on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of families that the reconstruction and resettlement had helped and who had participated in the projects.  The programme had completed 25,000 housing units complete with water systems, schools, health centres, roads and other civic facilities.

Ms. Catley-Carlson, Chair of the Global Water Partnership, said she had been trying to get the international community to understand the “silent emergencies”, which happened because the world did not or could not take on the changes needed to face up to the fact that growing world population was reducing the per capita availability of water, the extraordinary growth rates of cities, and the enormous problems encountered by informal and peri-urban settlements in getting access to water and sanitation.  Such quiet emergencies were very difficult, in the sense that for the media to cover the fact that 6,000 children died each day was difficult because it all happened very separately and had been happening for a very long time.  The continuing crisis in water and sanitation was one of trachoma and other unnecessary diseases, like diarrhoea and cholera, which resulted from the lack of access to drinking water and the absence of the habit and availability of sanitation.

Asked how the violence in Iraq had impacted the settlement programme, Ms. Berwari replied that what people saw on television were local incidents.  Iraq, in general, was a functioning place where offices were running.  Her ministry had 300 municipal officers across the country managing water and sanitation and other urban issues.  Though insecurity was hampering some reconstruction and resettlement efforts, the Governing Council was working with the Coalition Provision Authority and local communities to ensure enough security was in place.

Another correspondent asked whether thought had been given to the fact that a lot of water would be available when hydrogen cars were more widely used.  Would there be a means to get such water and store it where it could be useful?

Ms. Catley-Carlson said she was not sure what the yield would be.  In some cities, about 60 per cent of the water that entered the central system was lost in leaking mains and pipes.  It might be better to go after that water, to go after the water resulting from the use of hydrogen or fuel cell methods of running a car.

Asked how many homeless or displaced people there were in Iraq, Ms. Berwari replied there were an estimated 1.2 million internally displaced persons.  In addition, many refugees were returning from Iran and other countries where they had fled for political reasons.  One of the pressures that the current government had to deal with was two sets of displaced, one each in the north and south.

About 800,000 internally displaced persons were in the northern Iraq and the rest were spread in the southern Shia areas.  There were some cases of urban displacement that was poverty-driven or economically-driven, but not politically-driven.  Some were living in public buildings, former military camps and communities.  In the north, some were living in camps for internally displaced persons in camps provided by the United Nations before September 2003 and supported today by local governments.

Asked about major achievements in water and challenges for the future, Ms. Catley-Carson replied that the biggest achievement was that 5 billion out of the world’s 6.2 billion people had access to safe water following a global population growth of 2.5 billion to 5 billion in the last 50 years.  That meant governments all over the world had accorded a considerable priority to the provision of safe water and a lesser one to sanitation, because 2 billion people still lacked sanitation.  Another achievement had been simply providing people with safe water.  Despite the great progress made, however, such as the boring of wells in Bangladesh, arsenic in those same wells had created another health risk.

The challenge was that the current water and sanitation situation did not bother the wealthy people in most countries while the poor, particularly women, were left out, she noted.  In Africa, women spent an estimated 40 billion hours looking for water every year.  Not enough attention was paid to all those who were left out.

Responding to a journalist’s question, Ms. Tibaijuka said there was a dangerous and counter-productive notion taking hold in the world that water was free.  Water was both a right and a commodity.  The idea that it was free was gaining ground in Africa and India, but also in many other places.  Water was especially expensive in Africa, where the labour of the women and girls who fetched it was considered to be of zero value.  However, by devoting long hours to the search for water, girls traded education for water at a very high cost.  It cost money to move water from the source as well as to distribute it to households, which consumed about 20 per cent of all water pumped, she pointed out.

UN-Habitat was trying to advocate and promote responsible use of water around the world, she said.  There should be an equitable tariff structure guaranteeing water as a right, while recognizing that it was a commodity.  The public, recognizing water as a right, must guarantee some minimum or lifeline tariff structure.  For example, people had to be able to afford water in the settlements where they lived.

She said that under UN-Habitat’s Water for African Cities Programme in South Africa, the city of Johannesburg had pioneered such a graded tariff structure for water.  Those wasting water would have to pay for it.  But beyond a minimum guaranteed right, the price would start going up.  Water must be used responsibly.  The world was currently facing an absurd situation where the slum-dwelling poor were not connected to municipal supplies, which were subsidized through low tariff structures.  The poor, therefore, paid up to 20 times more for water than the rich, who wasted water through profligate use.

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