African Wildlife and Environment Issue 67

CONSERVATION

To this end many projects have been done and young people are learning how to conserve water. Most notable about the project is the participatory manner in which young people are engaged and this is often done through citizen science practices. To this end a wide array of citizen science tools are available to help people of all ages understand water processes (see www.minisass.org as an example of such a tool). In 2016 the GLOBAL PARTICIPATORY WATER MANAGEMENT NETWORK (GPWMN) was formed. The GPWMN is a reference community for the participatory management of water and environmental care. The founding members of the GPWMN are the companies and organisations that have projects of good practices, and who have also received awards from the Office of the Decade of Water of the United Nations. As an award winner

Her Worship the Mayor of eThekwini, representatives of the Global Participatory Water Management Network, ladies and gentlemen. “Tinariwen, a band of Tuareg musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali, named their 2007 album Aman Iman , which means ‘water is life’ in their language Tamashek. It is hardly surprising that a group of nomads from the hottest and largest non polar desert would regard water as so important, but it is trite that Aman iman is true for everybody, not just desert-dwellers. The link between water and life is the basis of the defining question for exploration of Mars, for if there is evidence of liquid water, past or present, on Mars, then there exists the possibility of life. I wrote this as the beginning of an introduction to a book I co-edited entitled Water and the Law: Towards Sustainability , published in 2014. The focus of my address this evening is not law, but the introduction is equally apposite to what I intend to cover here. It highlights the fact that, when we speak of management of water, we are not managing it for its own sake but for all life on the planet, including, of course, human life. But why does water need management? It is an obvious answer but needs to be said. Human activity has created such pressure on our global water resources that we have now – and not just recently – entered a situation that can be referred to, without any exaggeration, as a water crisis. There aremany interventions that can andmust be made in order to address the causes and symptoms of the water crisis, but very few if any of these will have much success without the participation of people who rely on water: civil society. Increasingly, environmental management, which includes management of water, is seen as an objective that cannot be achieved satisfactorily by top-down command and control processes. The evidence that this approach has not worked is all around us. WESSA, an environmental non-governmental organisation that is more than 90 years old, is a member of the Global Participatory Water Management Network (GPWN) and has as its overarching objective the aim to initiate and support high impact environmental and conservation projects to promote participation in caring for the Earth. It is clear, therefore, that WESSA’s aims correspond with those of the GPWMN. What I aim to do in this short speech is to highlight those aspects of WESSA’s work that are directly related to participatory water management. WESSA focuses its work, broadly, in seven areas: • Ecological infrastructure and sustainability • Ecotourism, which includes the Blue Flag programme aimed at healthy beaches • Work Skills

WESSA is thus a founding partner of the GPWMN. It is notable that in 1949 WESSA was a founding partner of the IUCN, now the largest grouping of environmental organisations in the world! Is the GPWMN likely to do for water what the IUCN is doing for holistic, wise and sustainable environmental management? From 14 to 16 of September 2017 the S haring and Caring for Water: The Voice of Africa conference was hosted in Durban and this conference was co-hosted by eThekwini, WESSA and the GPWMN. Pieter Burger, the WESSA KZN Chairman, convened the Local Organising Committee (LOC) that managed the conference processes. This meant that the mutual synergies of these three organisations could be developed and best-practice concepts could be shared and engaged with. The longer term vision is to convey the ‘Voice of Africa’ to the 2018 Water Summit in Brazil. The key note presentation at the Sharing and Caring for Water conference was presented by Professor Michael Kidd, the Chairman of the Board of WESSA. His address was highly relevant to the work of WESSA and it is our privilege to share it with our African Wildlife and Environment readers. The speech by Prof Michael Kidd follows.

Dr Jim Taylor Director: Environmental Education WESSA jt@wessa.co.za

7 | African Wildlife & Environment | 67 (2017)