Experts and leaders will soon come together in their thousands at the first UN conference dedicated to water in nearly half a century.
At the conference, which begins on March 22 in New York, delegates will no doubt stress that “water is life”. And it’s true: water nourishes, cleanses and even inspires the poetry and painting so desperately needed by our modern and rushed society. We really cannot live without it.
But as a professor of water security who focuses on its role in conflict, I know that water is death, too. And I don’t just mean the awesome destructive force of floods – hundreds of children in Pakistan and twice as many adults drowned when a “monsoon on steroids” burst the banks of the Indus River last summer – or agonising spells of drought.
