Water Security Takes Center Stage at UN Meeting

Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
participated in a roundtable on water security while visiting the United
Nations in New York, raising the security profile of water among delegates at
the UN General Assembly meeting.

In a speech in March honoring World Water Day, Secretary
Clinton said that water is “an essential
ingredient of global peace, stability, and security.” She added: “We think
it actually is our duty and responsibility to make sure that this water issue
stays at the very top of America’s foreign policy and national security
agenda.”

Secretary Clinton’s remarks earlier this year coincided with
the release of the intelligence community’s Global Water
Security report, a study commissioned by the State Department to
analyze the effect of water on U.S. foreign policy and national security
interests. “This assessment is a landmark document that puts water security in
its rightful place as part of national security,” Secretary Clinton said of the
report.

Yesterday, Secretary Clinton reiterated her clarion call for
action to address the growing global water crisis, drawing on the intelligence community’s findings to frame water as a security issue. 

“Now, this year alone in the United States, we’ve
experienced extreme drought conditions in some parts of our country and
devastating floods in others. We are well aware that Europe, Asia, and Africa
have all experienced similar challenges. Now, you’ve already heard about our
Intelligence Community Assessment on Global Water Security, and I hope that you
will have if you didn’t today have a chance to really study it, because water
scarcity could have profound implications for security,” Secretary Clinton said
yesterday.

“The report found that dwindling supplies and poor
management of water resources will certainly affect millions of people as food
and crops grow scarcer and access to water more difficult to obtain. In fact,
in some places, the water tables are already more depleted than we thought and
wells are drying up.”

Read Secretary Clinton’s
full remarks here. 

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