Water Is Everybody's Business

However, it also showed that there is now an immediate need for broad-based collaborative action. "The World Water Forum has done an excellent job of fostering a common understanding [of water issues] among interested parties. To move forward, it now needs to engage beyond the water community," said WBCSD Water Project co-chair Sylvain Lhôte from Borealis . "People who were in Istanbul know that water is everybody's business. Others might not."

The WBCSD was the main leading business organization in Istanbul for the duration of the forum: it was part of the official program, represented at the ministerial roundtables and a founding partner of Business Action for Water.

"What we have seen over the past week is heartening in that there has been a great amount of interest shown. There was much more business representation, participation and collaboration in Istanbul than at the previous World Water Forum in Mexico in 2006, which is encouraging. But now the time has come to translate all this interest into action," said ITT Corporation's Björn von Euler, the other WBCSD Water Project co-chair.

During the high-level and ministerial sessions, business not only stressed the need for collaborative actions to address the full complexity of water issues but also the sense of urgency. We need to act now in a preventive way but also use and transfer the technologies that exist today to improve water and energy efficiency, for example.