Water management, seen as the key to fighting poverty and promoting economic growth in Asia and Africa, will take centre stage at the World Water Week, which gathers experts from 100 countries in Stockholm starting Monday, officials and participants said.
"Water is the key to dealing with the twin challenges of poverty and growth," said Sunita Narain, whose Indian environmental organization The Center for Science and Environment (CSE) won this year's 150,000-dollar (114,000-euro) Stockholm Water Prize for its work to improve water management.
"Water will make or break India," she told AFP.
Narain, an ardent promoter of rainwater harvesting in her native country, said she would remind the conference that Western models of water management had only limited relevance to countries like India and China.
"When today's industrialized countries developed, they had a higher per-capita income, lower energy costs and not such huge populations," she said.
There was a direct link between access to clean water and wealth, she said.
Polluted water was the top factor in the death of babies and the second-biggest factor of premature adult deaths after starvation, which in itself was linked to a water shortage.
"Water is the key driver of socio-economic development," David Trouba, a spokesman for conference organizer, the Stockholm International Water Institute, told AFP.
"Better water and sanitation save lives and saves money," said the institute's director, Anders Berntell. "Once the realization sinks in, change will follow."
The water week hopes to become "the annual meeting place for people working with water", said Trouba, and its programme is as diversified as the water needs of the world's regions.
Questions of infrastructure, coping with climate issues, water in agriculture, land degradation and water pollution are on the programme.
Seminars range from one about cities and water use – "The political economy of defecation" – to how to improve the marketing of better toilets, and whether mass installation of dams has been beneficial or harmful.
Fighting corruption in water management will also be a topic, still being "one of the least addressed challenges", the institute said.
"Historically, bilateral and multilaterial organizations and their clients more or less tacitly accepted corruption in public service delivery," it said.
The Swedish hosts will award a number of prizes and offer educational tours, including on local drainage management or how urine can be used for the cultivation of flowers and vegetables.
Most of the experts at the conference are from developed economies, but water prize laureate Narain said water advice and experience would no longer be a one-way street.
"The focus has always been on water technology developed in the North, but now it's time we listened to each other's wisdom," she said.
The Stockholm water week runs until Friday.
