Our Team :: New Jersey :: Christine Todd Whitman
Water Policy Institute Meeting
Opening Remarks by Christine Todd Whitman
Washington, DC, June 18, 2008
Thank you, Kathy (Robb), and good morning.
This is an important day and this is an important meeting.
The work that the Water Policy Institute will undertake is crucial to the future of the United States and the future of all the people of the world.
I have, for many years now, believed that water is the greatest environmental challenge facing the world in the 21st century.
Global climate change gets more public notice, but there’s no doubt in my mind that we must also address the persistent and serious problem of insufficient access to adequate quantities of clean, safe water.
Today and everyday almost one in every five people – more than 1.1 billion people around the world – lack reliable access to safe, clean water.
According to the World Health Organization, every year, tens of millions of people fall sick from diseases connected to unsafe water or poor water resource management practices and more than a million die from such causes.
This is a crisis of enormous proportion, and it isn’t getting significantly better.
Development in the developing world is placing huge pressures on existing water supplies.
A recent Goldman Sachs report showed that water consumption globally is doubling about once every 20 years.
Given the expected continued growth in demand, many have observed that combined pressure on demand and price will make water the oil of the 21st century.
Such pressures may well produce the sort of geopolitical challenges over water we have seen over oil, leading to political instability in nations that cannot supply enough water to meet the needs of their peoples to regional water wars.
According to a recent Christian Science Monitor article, a London-based NGO has “identified 46 countries with a combined population of 2.7 billion where contention over water has created ‘a high risk of violent conflict’ by 2025.”
In the developed world, we have long taken for granted that when we turn on the tap, clean, safe water will flow – although that’s beginning to change.
But consider this: the first time you flushed a toilet today you already used more water than most people in Africa have available to drink, cook with, clean with, and wash with over the course of a full day.
Nevertheless, the hard realities of water shortages are being felt more broadly and widely than ever before in the developed world.
In Barcelona, for example, there’s a ban on watering your flowers, and it’s serious. If you’re caught violating it, you’re subject to a $13,000 fine.
In California, where Governor Schwarzenegger recently issued a drought declaration, a number of communities have already instituted mandatory water rationing, and more are expected to follow suit.
And in Georgia last year, the need for rain was so acute the governor and members of the legislature joined clergy on the steps of the state capitol in offering prayers for rain.
I’m all for divine intervention – and have privately called on it myself from time to time – but I haven’t found it to be a substitute for responsible stewardship of our water resources.
I find it hard to believe, but it’s been 25 years since I was first elected to public office, as a county official in Somerset County, New Jersey.
Almost from the first day in office, I have been wrestling with water issues.
They’ve ranged from contaminated groundwater caused by leaking landfills to the quality of the ocean waters off New Jersey’s 127 miles of beautiful beaches to regulating arsenic levels in drinking water and everything in between.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that water issues can be very contentious and extremely emotional.
That’s to be expected. The average human body consists of about two-thirds water.
It’s said we can survive three weeks without food but only three days without water.
And since I mentioned prayer a minute ago, I was interested to learn recently that one scholar found 722 references to water in the Bible – the first in the second verse of the first chapter in Genesis and the last in the closing verses of Revelation.
So my point here is that everybody cares about water for very obvious and personal reasons – and they always have.
That’s why it is so important that policy makers in the years ahead have access to clear, objective, compelling advice and information about how to best meet the enormous challenge of providing all the people of the world with reliable access to safe, clean water.
And that’s why the work that the Water Policy Institute will do is of vital importance.
The founding of the Institute could not come at a better or more urgent time.
The Institute is bringing together as members water leaders who are not only big players in the world of water; they are also responsible and visionary leaders.
The Institute has also assembled an advisory panel that includes some of the nation’s and the world’s leading water experts in the scientific, academic, and NGO communities, along with leading former government officials and others who know these issues inside and out.
They understand these issues from the environmental perspective – a perspective shaped and informed by years and decades of experience.
There is literally no other forum like this available that gives such a diverse group of water leaders the opportunity to come together to both consider the problems and challenges we desperately face and to develop the new ideas and potential solutions we urgently need.
And while I earlier said in jest that climate change gets better press when it comes to the awareness of impending environmental crises, I think we can take advantage of that by drawing more clearly the link between climate change and water issues.
Melting glaciers in the Himalayas, for example, create the risk of extreme water run-off in parts of Asia that will end up both reducing available fresh water supplies and degrading the quality of the soil.
And rising sea levels pose the threat of making current supplies of fresh water unusable, as seawater advances ever deeper into estuaries and the rivers that feed them.
Working through the Institute, the members, advisory board, and staff have an enviable opportunity to make a real, measurable, and lasting difference.
Because water issues can become so political, it is vitally important that policymakers have access to objective data about both the challenges and the possible solutions to those challenges.
Having spent many years in public office, I know that no matter how determined or courageous or visionary a political leader is, she – or he – won’t get far if she can’t make an argument based on clear and compelling facts that support the need for action.
That’s especially true when new policies come with a cost – and almost every new environmental policy does.
Business leaders, of course, face the same challenge, especially when dealing with shareholders.
There are always those who are skeptical about any policy that impacts the bottom-line in the short-run, no matter how much it’s needed in the long run.
The solutions that will work best and that are most likely to be adopted are those that are innovative, sustainable, and ultimately cost-effective.
Those are the sorts of solutions we should be shooting for and I am optimistic we have the talent, the resources, and the vision to help develop them.
I also believe that the Water Policy Institute will help policymakers in every sector better understand – and more effectively communicate and advance – the need for action.
We have a lot of work ahead of us and a full agenda today so let me close, for now, by expressing my thanks to Kathy Robb and to Hunton and Williams for conceiving and establishing this vitally important forum.
Let me also thanks and applaud each of you for your commitment to the Water Policy Institute and to participating in what I know will be a very worthwhile effort.
I look forward to working with you and to what I believe we can accomplish together.
Thank you.