The global water community has been charting creative policy solutions to address challenges related to water for decades, often calling on the private sector to adopt, adapt and adhere to such plans. Today, we are happy to see some of these creative solutionsturn into innovative partnerships between different actors. Opening the recent Stockholm +40 Conference, the Swedish Minister of International Cooperation, Ms. Gunilla Carlsson, highlighted the Sweden Textile Water Initiative (STWI) as an example of such innovation. Under the initiative, 32 Swedish textile and leather companies joined forces with SIWI to improve water use throughout their supply chains. In its pilot inception project, 12 textile factories in Bangladesh were able to reduce their water use by 75 million litres of water, and their use of chemicals by 6 million kilogrammes in just one year.
The World Water Week will also host the 10th Annual Meeting of the International Water Resources Economics Consortium (IWREC), which will bring a host of world leading economists to give valuable input into the week’s deliberations. On page 9, readers can get an insight on why it is important to set a value for water to be able to achieve a positive change. This issue of the Stockholm Water Front also includes two examples of working with communities in remote countryside regions in China and Kenya. The first article explores whether Chinese policies can bring development to the People’s Republic’s water-scarcest regions, while the other article explores a pilot project in a remote Kenyan region that aimed to increase community participation through increasing awareness of “water as a human right.”
More SIWI news related to projects, prizes and partners are also included in this issue of Stockholm Water Front. Please do not hesitate to give us feedback on any issue you read in this magazine, by sending an email to waterfront@siwi.org.
