The world is now facing a water crisis, including water shortages and water pollution. The United Nations has designated 2003 as the International Year of Freshwater and is calling for efforts to tackle water problems on a global scale. Japan, for its part, will host the Third World Water Forum in March in the three prefectures of Kyoto, Shiga, and Osaka. The forum will be a large-scale international platform to discuss water problems from many angles, and approximately 8,000 people of various profiles will gather for the event. Through the dialogue at this forum, it is hoped that new efforts to solve water problems will be proposed and carried out.

Discussing the Problems from Every Angle
The Third World Water Forum will be held from March 16 to 23. The focus of the conference will be sessions on about 350 themes. These sessions will look at the whole range of water problems from diverse standpoints, from global-scale problems to problems at the local community level, from academic and highly technical problems to everyday problems shared by ordinary people. In parallel with these discussions, sessions focusing on individual regions will also be held. For this purpose, each of the five regions of the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Mediterranean, Africa, Europe, and the Americas will have its own day during the forum.

In order to reflect the results of these discussions in actual policies, for the first time at the World Water Forum a dialogue will be held on March 21 between the forum participants and ministers. This will be followed on March 22 and 23 by the Ministerial Conference, which is the highlight of the forum. Some 120 ministers in charge of water-related issues from countries around the world and the heads of international organizations are scheduled to discuss water problems, announce the Portfolio for Water Actions and specific action programs by their countries and organizations, and issue a ministerial declaration. The themes that may go into the declaration include: Water Resources Management and Benefit Sharing; safe drinking water and sanitation; water for food and rural development; water pollution prevention and ecosystem conservation; and disaster mitigation and risk management. The declaration is expected to be an action-oriented and strong political message.

The participation of children is another important aspect of the conference. At the Children's World Water Forum to be held from March 18 to 22, 100 young people aged 12 to 18 from 26 countries will gather to discuss water problems. As well as sessions on various themes and a plenary meeting the children will take part in numerous other events, including an experiential study cruise around Lake Biwa, adventures in Osaka using an amphibious vehicle, and production of their own newspaper in Kyoto. At the end they will adopt a Children's Declaration.

Exhibitions and other events on various themes relating to water, such as the Water Expo in Osaka and the Biwako Water Festival, will also be held across the whole Yodo River Basin and Lake Biwa area, which is known for its historical heritage and abundant nature.

An Ongoing Dialogue on Water
Water is the lifeblood of society. But humanity faces a critical shortage, because 97.5% of the water on earth is seawater, with fresh water accounting for only the remaining 2.5%. Moreover, most of the fresh water consists of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic and underground water; no more than 0.01% of the fresh water is available for human use. And the world also faces other serious water problems, including pollution, floods and droughts, and disputes over water rights.

International interest in these water problems began to grow in the 1970s. The United Nations held the first Water Conference in 1977, and three years later it proclaimed the decade from 1981 to 1990 the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade. By 1992 the importance of freshwater resources was a major theme at international conferences. The World Water Forum was started by the World Water Council, which was established in 1996 as an international think tank on water policy. The first forum, held in 1997 in Marrakech, Morocco, proposed the formulation of a World Water Vision, and the completed vision was presented at the second forum, held in 2000 in the Hague, the Netherlands.

The region hosting the Third World Water Forum, which is home to Lake Biwa and the Yodo River Basin, is showing much enthusiasm, and not without reason: Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, has historically incorporated its abundant underground water resources into its culture. Shiga is the home of Lake Biwa, the largest and oldest lake in Japan. And Osaka is promoting an urban revival project centered on its restoration as a "water city."