Ladies and gentlemen,

We are gathered to talk about water security and the legal challenges involved in the management of transboundary waters.

[Since the topic is in part of a legal nature I can’t help but offer an anecdote at the expense of our dear friends the lawyers. A former prime minister of ours, himself a lawyer, once entered the podium at the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo. He opened his speech something like the following: Dear law students. The world is full of lawyers. If you took all the lawyers in the world today and laid them down in a line along the Equator... Actually, wouldn’t THAT be a good idea?] [.....]

Jokes aside, I fully realize the importance of law, and of lawyers, and in fact I’m more in favor of using the Arctic circle..

I would like to put water into a broader conceptual framework as a background for your discussions. You know as well as I do that ensuring equitable and sustainable management of the world’s water resources will be one of the major challenges of this century, a challenge where we definitely must use law as one of the key instruments.

The problems

• We know that water is a key resource for all social and economic development.
• We know that basic human needs are not being met and that more than one billion people do not have access to adequate supplies of clean water.
• We know the toll of human suffering that results, including premature deaths and health problems.
• We know that the poor carry the heaviest burden in terms of the loss of livelihood and health problems caused by a lack of clean water.
• We know that 50 per cent of the world’s wetlands have disappeared in the past century and that 20 per cent of freshwater fish are endangered or extinct.
• We also know that, if we continue to do business as usual, water scarcity will become an even bigger problem. Water use by people is expected to increase by 40 per cent in the next twenty years, so that by 2025, there will be 3.5 billion people living in water-stressed areas.

For all these very good reasons the UN Millennium Declaration set the goal of halving the number of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water by 2015.

The Millennium Declaration also sets out the resolve of the Member States to stop "the unsustainable exploitation of water resources by developing water management strategies at regional, national and local levels, promoting both equitable access and adequate supplies". So how can we make this happen? How can we solve the water crisis?

The primary responsibility for ensuring equitable and sustainable management rests with governments. Of course we should not overlook the important role of major stakeholders and Norway does for instance encourage greater participation by the private sector, particularly in the provision of water infrastructure. But it is governments that must carry out the essential water management function of protecting and allocating water resources.

Integrated water resource management

Over the past two decades there have been many debates about the basic principles and tools for water management. A huge body of generally accepted principles has been developed. They include principles related to integrated water resource management, water as a public and social good and water economics.

Norway is blessed with rich water resources and almost 100 per cent of our electricity is hydropower. Norway applies the principles of integrated water resource management, and I would like to enlarge on this a little.

Integrated management requires us to take into account such essential aspects as the water cycle, water quality and quantity, and the aquatic ecosystem, and means that the entire river basin must be used as the management unit. Socio-economic as well as scientific and technological considerations must be included. And the key ecological functions of forests, wetlands, ground water and streams must be maintained in order to ensure safe and stable water supplies. The integrated management approach is important, and Norway will continue to advocate the adoption of these principles.

Many legal, economic and other planning and decision-making tools are available to ensure the implementation of integrated management principles. Here in Norway, we have developed fairly sophisticated legal tools for integrated management of our water resources.

Water as a shared resource

But Norway is not alone in the world - and water knows no political boundaries but flows as it chooses. Norway shares river basins with Russia, Finland and Sweden, and cooperates with these countries on river management. From reading Professor Wolf’s paper, which has been submitted to next week’s conference in Bonn, I have learned that there are 261watersheds that cross the boundaries of two or more countries. These transboundary watercourses affect about 40 per cent of the world’s population and account for approximately 60 per cent of global river flow.

No one doubts that water is an internationally shared resource. In transboundary waters, international cooperation should be encouraged and the whole aquatic ecosystem should be managed under an integrated regime. There are many possible mechanisms for promoting regional water cooperation. We have some good examples of intergovernmental cooperation in our own region, such as the EU Water Framework Directive and the ECE Convention on Transboundary Watercourses. The use of international law in these regions has proved to be an efficient and very useful tool.

Because water is an international resource that flows between countries, and because the problems of ensuring that people have access to water are so difficult and worrying, Norway attaches great importance to water issues in its foreign policy and development cooperation.

Regional cooperation

The world’s water resources are unevenly distributed, and there are particularly disturbing scenarios in the Middle East, southern Africa and parts of India and China. As water scarcity becomes more severe, there is a risk that water will increasingly become a source of conflict between states and peoples.

However, sharing water has also been an important element of cooperation in many cultures, and there are many such regional cooperative efforts today as well. Some make use of legal tools to a larger extent than others. The international community has a special responsibility for providing such regional cooperation initiatives with political, technical and financial support. Norway is currently supporting regional cooperation efforts in the Middle East, in the Nile Basin, in southern Africa and in South-east Asia.

If they are to be successful, regional initiatives, models for conflict resolution and cooperation efforts must come from the riparian partners themselves. The task of the donor community is to respond to local and regional riparian initiatives, not to impose them. Donor support should be given on the basis of the developing countries’ own priorities and provided in a coordinated manner. An increased focus on donor coordination should not lead to the establishment of new organisations or top-down approaches: these could prove to be very counter-productive.

We all have much to learn from existing regional initiatives, and I hope that one result of this seminar will be increased sharing of knowledge and experience.

Water as a key to development and poverty reduction

‘Water for the poor’ is an appropriate title for next week’s water conference in Bonn. Water is indispensable for human health and welfare and for the economic growth needed to alleviate poverty. The challenge of water scarcity must be viewed as a part of the fight against poverty.

Why?

• poverty is today’s number one global challenge
• the poor suffer more than anyone else from a lack of safe water for drinking and other uses. Who do you think the one billion people without access to clean water are? Certainly not the rich...
• poverty and inequality fuel instability and conflict
• strategies to combat water scarcity and prevent water conflict will fail unless they are synchronised with strategies to alleviate and eradicate poverty.

Cooperation at the global level

The effective and sustainable management of water resources for development and poverty reduction is a daunting challenge.

At the multilateral and global level, water issues are being dealt with by many different organisations, networks and initiatives. WHO, WMO, UNESCO, FAO, UNIDO, UNEP, UNDP and the World Bank are all important actors that have water issues on their agendas. So have cooperation networks and associations like the World Water Council and the Global Water Partnership. But no institution or programme has the overall responsibility for coordination and supporting the good work that is already being done.

Stronger cooperation between existing mechanisms is called for, particularly within the UN system and between it and other bodies established under intergovernmental treaties and international financial institutions. It seems appropriate for the UN to take the leading role. The pre-eminence of the UN as the parent body for international cooperation between governments ensures the necessary links to national decision-makers. Only a UN body could organise concerted action to assist the hardest hit regions by redirecting the water programmes of UN organisations and other bodies to problem hot spots for a prolonged period, in order to lift these regions over the threshold to sustainable water management.

The Ministerial Declaration of The Hague on Water Security in the 21st Century called upon the Secretary General of the United Nations "to further strengthen the coordination and coherence of activities on water issues within the UN system."

Norway agrees that closer international cooperation is called for. It is time to implement the agreed principles of water management set out in Agenda 21, the decisions and recommendations of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development and the Ministerial Declaration from The Hague. One important step would be to make already existing legal instruments such as the UN Convention on the Law on the Non-navigational Uses of Transboundary Water Courses and International Lakes effective and efficient.

I want to touch upon a specific instrument that is relevant to the sustainable management of freshwater, and where there is interesting legal work underway. It concerns socalled "strategic environmental assessment"—a tool specifically designed to help policymakers make sound and environmentally sustainable decisions. Strategic environmental assessment can be used, for example, to examine the potential, future impacts of developments along an entire river basin. Or, it can assess the implications of proposed legislation or plans pertaining to the agricultural or urban uses of water, or the privatization of water utilities. I’m providing water related examples here, but strategic environmental assessment is of course applied across a number of sectors.

To date, most "SEAs" have been undertaken in OECD countries, but developing countries are also increasingly applying the instrument, since it fills an important gap. It makes for providing decisionmakers with relevant environmental information that is not site- or project specific but that is relevant for aggregate decision making. The legal relevance, and the relevance to this seminar has to do with the fact that (one) there is now an EU Directive in force on SEA, and (two) work is underway to develop a UN Protocol on SEA, under the framework of the Espoo convention. Those who work on the legal dimension of sustainable water use should take a look at this work.

Next week, ministers will gather in Bonn to discuss water for the poor. The aim of the conference is not to repeat the many debates about basic principles of water management but to focus on how to implement these principles. If we are to reach the goals set forth in the Millennium Declaration, action is needed. I promise you that in Bonn and in the run-up to the World Summit in Johannesburg next year Norway will do its best to keep water high up on the agenda and focus on the action needed.

Law in itself is not justice - it is only a mechanism, but in our experience a crucial and useful mechanism, despite my earlier joking about lawyers. This seminar can help us to identify when legal measures are appropriate in the management of transboundary waters. I regret that I am not able to participate in the discussions. However, I will be receiving reports on the results of this seminar, and I am looking forward to learning more about your findings and recommendations.

Thank you for listening.