The Water Challenge:
• Water is essential for life, development, and a healthy environment — yet accessible freshwater is extremely limited.
• Growing populations, increasing food and energy demands, climate change, and pollution place rising pressure on our water resources.
• Many regions still struggle with water scarcity, poor water quality, and the impacts of droughts and floods, which affect health, economies, and ecosystems.
Read more- (link to GWPO website: The Water Challenge – GWP)
Vision and Mission
The Global Water Partnership’s vision is for a water secure world. Our mission is to support the sustainable development and management of water resources at all levels.
GWP believes that an integrated approach to managing the world’s water resources is the best way to pursue this vision—a vision that encompasses all of life.
GWP takes its guiding principles from the Dublin and Rio statements (1992), from the Millennium Assembly (2000), which gave rise to the Millennium Development Goals, and from the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002) Plan of Action, which set a target for the preparation of IWRM and Water Efficiency plans. Over time, GWP has adapted and elaborated these principles to reflect international understanding of the ‘equitable and efficient management and sustainable use of water’.
Read more (link to GWPO website)
Agenda 2030 – Water, Sustainable Development & the SDGs -Read more (link to GWPO website)
What is Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM)? -Read more (link to GWPO website)
GWP 2026 – 2030 Strategy-Read more (link to GWPO website)
The guiding principles are:
- Freshwater is a finite and vulnerable resource, essential to sustain life, development and the environment.
- Water development and management should be based on a participatory approach involving users, planners, and policy makers all levels.
- Women play a central part in the provision, management and safeguarding of water.
- Water is a public good and has a social and economic value in all its competing uses.
- Integrated water resources management is based on the equitable and efficient management and sustainable use of water and recognises that water is an integral part of the ecosystem, a natural resource, and a social and economic good, whose quantity and quality determine the nature of its utilisation.