UNSGAB meeting in Amsterdam
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Your Royal Highness, ladies and gentlemen,
It is a great privilege for the Netherlands that the UNSGAB is holding its 13th meeting in Amsterdam. And it is a great honour and pleasure for me to be here and to speak with you about water and climate change in The Netherlands. At the eve of Copenhagen, this is a very well chosen moment to discuss this matter.
Water is constantly changing its substance: it evaporates, it freezes and it becomes fluid again.
The fluxion of water is a retuning item on our daily news. It is the subject of headlines in almost every newspaper we read. Floods and droughts have an enormous impact on lives of citizens all over the world. These disasters painfully remind us that we don’t always control our water. Still, we keep seeking solutions to global water challenges.
To this end, we need people like you. People in key positions who fight global water challenges with commitment and passion. People with an independent view.
People from UNSGAB who are looking
· beyond the borders of countries;
· beyond the borders of institutions;
· beyond the borders of sub-themes like drinking water, sanitation and disaster management.
UNSGAB is flexible and action-oriented.
In the five years of its existence, UNSGAB has grown into a leading advisory board. In this short time, your work has been very fruitful. For example, you have broken the silence around the issue of sanitation. After UNSGAB proclaimed 2008 the International Year of Sanitation, the taboo was broken. The theme was suddenly on the agendas of many international consultation bodies. In the Netherlands, popular magazines and newspapers now devote some of their pages to sanitation.
The public awareness of water issues in The Netherlands has increased over the past decade. His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange has made an important contribution to this. Your Highness, when you announced in 1997 that you wanted to become involved in water management, the country responded astonished and surprised. The general reaction was that water, off course, is wonderful. But it is not a theme in itself. Not everybody understood your choice for water immediately.
This wait-and-see attitude swiftly changed. The Prince believes that if people are more aware of the importance of water, they will be more willing to make a personal contribution to solving water-related problems. Since 2004, the Prince has been chair of the Water Advisory Committee. This independent body advises my ministry on water policy and its social impact. When it comes to water issues, like safety, spatial planning and sanitation, the Prince is deeply committed.
Awareness of the importance of water is crucial in a country like The Netherlands. Water flows through our entire history. Wherever you go in The Netherlands, there is water. It is even captured in the paintings of that The Netherlands’ great artists have produced over the centuries, for example by the painter Salomon van Ruysdael, as you can see on this slide.
Across the centuries, we have conquered our polders from the grip of water. At many places where there is now land, there used to be water. We depend heavily on the parts of our country that lay below sea level: over half of the Dutch population lives there and 65 % of our gross national product is earned in these areas. We rely on our dikes, dams and dunes. For Dutch people, this is completely normal.
However, foreign visitors sometimes feel different. When you landed at Schiphol Airport earlier this week, you landed four and a half metres below sea level. This may make you feel uneasy. But let me reassure you: you are safe. Thanks to our Delta Works, there hasn’t been a great flood over fifty years. We are the safest delta in the world. And we want to keep it that way.
To stay safe, we need to prepare our delta for the consequences of climate change. It is not enough anymore to focus on the situation in which we find ourselves today. The administration looks to the future and prepare for the changes that inevitably come our way. I am implementing a programme now to keep our country safe from flooding for the next hundred years. In this Delta Programme, we use our experience with water management that we’ve gained over the centuries.
But we also use innovative techniques. For example, we are planning to renovate the Afsluitdijk, the most important dike that protects the northern part of our country. Apart from its traditional function as a dike, the Afsluitdijk will generate electricity.
The Dutch government works with an adaptive agenda. This means that we prepare for the maximum sea level rise of 1,3 metres by 2100. It may turn out better or maybe worse than expected. If so, we will adapt the pace of our measures accordingly. This makes it possible to flexibly respond to future developments.
The Netherlands is preparing for climate change. But we are not doing this by ourselves. Because climate change impacts on countries all over the world. Therefore, we seek cooperation and we share knowledge with other countries. We learn from each other’s successes and from each other’s mistakes.
But The Netherlands also enters into partnerships with five delta areas elsewhere in the world. Areas that face great water challenges. This year, I was in Indonesia, Bangladesh and Vietnam. I saw there just how much we have in common with these countries when it comes to water challenges.
Early this year - at the World Water Forum in Istanbul - I took the initiative of putting water higher at the climate agenda. Water is a cross cutting issue in climate change. No water, no food. No water, no health. No water, no prosperity. No water, no future.
Besides international co-operation, we need a form of financial solidarity. The climate problem is largely caused by the wealth of Western countries. The consequences are also severe for developing countries. In Copenhagen, Europe will argue for reserving funds for adaptation in developing countries. It will involve additional financial resources, on top of the official development assistance that is already provided.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I would like to present you several important questions. Questions that we will ask ourselves as soon as climate adaptation receives the attention it deserves.
· We would like to see additional financial resources made available. But once the funding is there, how do we organise the effective and efficient use of these funds?
· How can we keep adaptation at the international agenda?
· How can the attention for adaptation contribute to solving drinking water and sanitation problems?
I have asked my Director-General of Water Management – Annemieke Nijhof – to lead our discussion and to explain our Delta Programme and the international efforts of the Netherlands in more detail. I would now like to hand over to Ms Nijhof.