Secretary Clinton on World Water Day

Now, we are pursuing [reliable access to water] not only because we care about it around the world; we care about it here at home. We've had increasing problems meeting our own needs in the Desert Southwest or managing floods in the East. No country anywhere, no matter how developed, is immune to the challenges that we face.

...Last year, I called on the intelligence community to conduct a global assessment of the impact water could have and was having on our national security. Today, the National Intelligence Council released the unclassified version of its report on Global Water Security. You can go online, read it for yourself [pdf], see how imperative clean water and access to water is to future peace, security, and prosperity, globally. I think it's fair to say the intelligence community's findings are sobering.

As the world's population continues to grow, demand for water will go up, but our freshwater supplies will not keep pace. In some places, the water tables are already more depleted than we had thought. In northern India, for example, over-extraction of groundwater could impact food security and access to water for millions of people. Some countries will face severe shortages within decades or even sooner.

...Today, we are launching a new public-private partnership to help answer that call for leadership and to expand the impact of America's work on water. The U.S. Water Partnership exemplifies the unity of effort and expertise we will need to address these challenges over the coming years, and it advances our work in three critical ways.

First, it brings together a diverse range of partners from the private sector, the philanthropic community, the NGOs, academics, experts, and government. This approach will help catalyze new opportunities for cooperation. For example, if Coca-Cola has the best data on available water supplies, and the Army Corps of Engineers has the capacity to advise on how to build water delivery systems, and the Nature Conservancy knows how to minimize the disruption to the environment, then we want everybody sharing information and delivering clean water in a sustainable way to communities in need.

Breaking down silos, barriers, obstacles has been one of my goals as Secretary of State, within our own government, with multilateral institutions, and between and among governments. Bringing people with varied water experience and expertise together will also force us to look for system-wide solutions. Now, you can't work on water as a health concern independently from water as an agricultural concern, and water that is needed for agriculture may also be water that is needed for energy production. So we need to be looking for interventions that work on multiple levels simultaneously and help us focus on systemic responses.

Now, of course, while water is a global problem, solutions happen at the local level. So the second goal of the U.S. Water Partnership is to make all this American knowledge and expertise accessible. The U.S. Water Web Portal will provide a single entry point to our data, best practices, and training to help empower people taking on these problems in their own communities. And it will help build international support for American approaches, technologies, companies, government agencies, our whole universe of experts standing ready to assist.

Finally, because this is a public-private venture, the U.S. Water Partnership will not depend on any one government agency or any one private organization to keep it going. The State Department is proud to be a founding partner, but we also hope that the partnership will spawn many new projects that may or may not involve us. The Water Partnership has built-in flexibility to address the world's changing water needs and to continue our work to find sustainable solutions.

In brief, we believe this will help map out our route to a more water secure world: a world where no one dies from water-related diseases; where water does not impede social or economic development; and where no war is ever fought over water.

A complete transcript of the Secretary's remarks are here. Find out more about World Water Day here.