 It's wonderful to have the opportunity to speak to you here this morning about the progress to date and the prospects looking forward for achieving SDG6 on water. For those of you who were here yesterday, Professor Koiki, not Governor Koiki, but Professor Koiki yesterday morning spoke to us about the evolution of our thinking in the global community about what we aspire to globally for our planet. He began with one Earth and walked through the steps to the SDGs that are the focal challenge for us today as an international community. I'll begin today with the MDGs and zoom in on the MDGs and the SDGs, which are our current challenge. So for those of you who remember the MDGs, the MDGs were the Millennium Development Goals that we looked toward achieving from 2000 to 2015. And I've prepared a bit of a pop quiz here because it's amazing how quickly we forget. So the MDG for water was not actually its own goal. It was a sub-goal. It was MDG7 Little Sea, and it was part of managing environmental sustainability, just a subset. And what we committed to doing between 2000 and 2015 was to have, cut in half, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation. So the pop quiz this morning, for those of you who remember, is did we achieve that or did we not? Now I'm not going to make anybody raise their hands. We've had a certain amount of hand raising. We've had a certain amount of hand holding. So I'm going to ask you just to know in your mind whether or not we achieved the MDG. And I know that every one of you here is right because the answer is both. The way the MDG was written was focusing on whether we could provide access to drinking water and separately to sanitation. We did achieve the drinking water, MDG. We did not achieve. We missed the sanitation MDG, not by much. So the goal of the drinking water, MDG, by having it, was to achieve 88% coverage and we achieved 91% coverage. For sanitation, we had hoped to achieve, and I am having trouble reading the little numbers there, 77%, but achieved in the end only 68%. So the question is moving forward for the SDGs, one would assume that what we have left is this increment, the other half. If we roughly cut in half the lack of access to water, drinking water and sanitation, do we then just have to fill that other half or are we well on our way? We're warmed up now. We know how to do these things. Should this be simple? We also have more momentum now. We've got our own SDG. We've seen in the last couple of years that through the World Economic Forum, our business leaders consistently point to water crises as a top priority for the business community. We've seen the high-level panel on water, which was a UN World Bank-sponsored secretariat where 11 sitting heads of state sat together to focus and raise awareness on the importance of water. We've seen all that political momentum. We've seen that business momentum. Shouldn't we be able to now achieve this sort of second half of the MDGs that was left undone? But in fact, the SDGs are fundamentally different from the MDGs. The SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, are first of all asking for water supply and sanitation for all. And you imagine that when you begin to enhance your water supply and sanitation, you do the easiest ones first, those where you have low-hanging fruit. The second half will always be harder. It will be the more enduring challenge. So the fact that we're trying now to completely eradicate situations in which people don't have access to water supply and sanitation, that will be harder in itself. In addition, we're now asking not just for access to water, but the sustainable management of water and sanitation. And that is also fundamentally different from what we asked in the MDGs. What we ask in the SDGs is not just the delivery of water and sanitation services, but it's the sustainable management. It's the water resources side. It looks at the disaster risk management side. It looks at the water quality side. So you see that there are actually eight sub-goals here, right? We have not just 6.1 in two, basically water and sanitation, but different harder 1 in 2. We also have water quality, water efficiency, integrated water management, and water and ecosystems. And then the ways in which we do these things. We're also looking to do differently with greater partnership and greater international cooperation. In addition, simply the fact that it is now its own and full goal adds additional pressure in terms of the political expectations and the business expectations and the social expectations. Not just that we achieve this, but how we achieve it. Because it has been raised as a priority. So let's take a little bit of a closer look at what we've committed to in these sub-goals, which are truly different from what we have committed to as an international community in the past, and see how we're doing on them. So the first two, as I mentioned, water and sanitation are similar to the MDGs, but they are different. First, let me just say this. If we were measuring the access to water supply and sanitation, water supply, this is 6.1, in the way we measured it under the MDGs, we would only have, and this is not an only, but there would be 84 million people without access to safely managed, sorry, access to water under the MDG definition. Under the SDG definition, which is much more rigorous, 2.1 billion people are uncovered, right? So that little bit that we saw left of the MDGs, that's not our goal anymore. The goalpost has been changed, the bar has been raised. So where we had 84 million uncovered by the MDG definition, we have 2.1 billion uncovered without access under the SDG goal, which is that much more ambitious. And if you look at this graphic, the trend line that separates the yellow from the blue, and I know it's hard to read, is if we continued our improvements at the rate that they're going now, who would be covered by 2030 if we don't step up our game? And the answer is that 68 countries are not on track at the rate that they're going now, and that in fact 10 countries are actually declining in percentage terms, they're not keeping up with population. So this is arguably the simplest of the SDG goals. It's access to safely managed drinking water for all, and we're not on track. If we look at 6.2, which is access to sanitation, we similarly have a changing of the goalposts. So by the MDG definition, we would have had 2.3 billion people without access to sanitation in the MDG definition. By the SDG definition, we have 4.5 billion who lack access. Again, we've raised the bar, we've changed the goalpost. Again, looking at this chart about the rate of change that we're seeing currently heading toward 2030, 89 countries are off track to achieve universal sanitation, and 20 countries are declining, are not keeping up with population growth in the provision of safely managed sanitation. So these are the two easy goals. These are the two goals we understand. These are the two goals that we measure, and we're not yet on track. We have changed the goalposts, but we have to step up our game. When we move past 6.1 and 2, we move into the newer goals. These are the more aspirational goals that don't really only apply to countries that have chronic underservice in water, but these are goals that challenge all countries. So here we move into these newer goals like water quality. And we find, and it depends on the statistics that you see, somewhere between 40% and 80% of wastewater globally is discharged untreated into the environment. So if we really want to improve water quality, wastewater treatment, and safe reuse, we have a lot of work to do here. And the trends are not in the right direction, arguably, or the trends continue to challenge us. So we see that mineral fertilizers, for example, have grown 10-fold since the 60s. Pesticides in dollar sales amounts have grown 35 times since 1970. These pesticides that are now somewhere in our environment. Livestock volumes or growth has tripled since the 1970s, and this is important because organic water pollution from livestock is now more widespread than organic water pollution from urban areas. So more organic pollution is coming from livestock than people. And in addition to simply this growth in the pesticides and fertilizers and industrial pollution that we're familiar with and we're working hard on, we now have these new pollutants that we don't understand quite as well. Some more exotic chemicals, some of the medicines, the hormones, the microplastics that are being released into the water. These are tremendous challenges. And I think very important that the SDGs are highlighting this growing challenge in water quality. The fourth sub-goal really speaks to scarcity. As water becomes more scarce relative to demand, we all know that there's a certain amount of water in the universe and on the earth. But as our demand grows, water becomes more scarce relative to demand and more people per cubic meter of water. So what we see now is two billion people in the world who are living in areas of water stress. And we expect frankly by 2050 that that could rise to four billion. So how do we increase our efficiency? How do we allocate our freshwater resources in a way that we can continue to achieve our social objectives and our economic objectives and our environmental sustainability in a world where each one of us has less water? One of the, a couple of the exciting opportunities here are the incredible innovations that we are seeing in terms of efficiency in agriculture, in terms of efficiency of the appliances that we all use from municipal water and also the potential for non-conventional water sources, wastewater recycling, desalination. The cost of desalination is dropped by 90% in the last 25 or 30 years. So that in some cases, in some contexts it's actually an economically viable source of secure drinking water. The fifth sub-goal is about implementing integrated water resources management. And this one you can think of as being driven by the potential competition, the increasing competition that we see for water as it becomes scarce relative to demand. And the way that this is being measured by the SDGs is looking at countries that are implementing integrated water resources management, which really does try to look across all of the different uses of water and make sure that they're being balanced and prioritized appropriately. That's on the national scale or the basin scale or the city scale. And then also looking at transboundary cooperation. And what we see is that less than half of the countries, 38% of countries report that they are implementing integrated water resources management, and there are challenges with that definition. And that 59% of transboundary basins have formal agreements. I think one of the more interesting aspects actually of this particular SDG target is that there isn't a numerical target set. It's asking for these practices to be adopted as appropriate. And we'll see how progress is made on those. The final large target is about protecting 6.6, protecting and restoring water-related ecosystems. And the trend that we're seeking to correct here is that we have lost about 70% of our natural wetlands over the last century. And these wetlands are as rich, often in biodiversity and ecosystems function as many rainforests. Yet they're disappearing very rapidly. They're also a very important store of terrestrial carbon. So the carbon cycle, climate change, about 35% of terrestrial carbon is actually stored in wetlands, peatlands, particularly in the frozen north. So the loss of these wetlands could actually create a carbon pulse that could be quite disruptive for us. So biodiversity ecosystem and carbon and hydrological cycles are very important here. So where does this leave us in terms of looking forward to the SDGs? I've just given you arguably a lot of bad news. We've identified trends in each one of the SDG targets and sub-goals where we're either off track to improve or we're heading really in the wrong direction, right? Greater pollution, greater scarcity, greater loss of ecosystems. We need to think about that as the SDG actually doing its job, right? The SDG was here to help us agree goals and identify trends that we need to change if we want to have the water management systems and the aquatic ecosystems for ourselves and the next generations. So the SDG has done its job in identifying the key issues. We now need to do our job in reversing these trends and in finding the ways to get on top of these targets and to achieve them. But what does this shift in the goalposts look like? Well, arguably it looks a lot like this. We raced hard for the MDGs and yet we now face the SDGs which are fundamentally much more difficult. It is not just completing the other half of what was left undone in the MDGs. It's a much more aspirational set of goals, not just for those who lack access, but for all countries who want to manage their water resources, their water quality, the equity of their water allocation in ways that serve their social priorities. So what do we need to do to make it up this mountain? Arguably these are extremely ambitious targets and they simply require more ambitious solutions. At the heart of these ambitious solutions need to be much more integrated and innovative approaches that deal with both the service delivery aspects which were the MDGs, delivering access to water supply and sanitation, but also the water resources management side. We need to spend more time and effort and energy on ensuring that we have sustained water resources, water resources of good quality, water resources that are allocated and valued in ways that conform with our social priorities. And all of this needs to be achieved or can only be achieved if we build on governments, information technologies, human capacity and innovation. We bring together financing and we keep in mind that the process needs to also be mindful of equity considerations and cooperation. But we see a tremendous amount this week. We see so many of the solutions that will be needed to achieve the SDGs. We see it both on the technical and engineering side and we see it also in terms of institutions and governance. So what are some of these examples? And we're talking a lot this week about the circular economy and you'll hear it in the panel, you'll see these extraordinary cities that are being run in ways that are completely different from the way we managed our water in the past. In the 19th and 20th century, the way we imagined water was very once through. We brought water into a city as cheaply as we could and we evacuated it as quickly as we could. It was about service delivery. It was about public health moving things through. It wasn't a circular economy where we needed to worry about the resource, reusing the resource, being conscious of the resource, focusing on not releasing harmful hazards into the environment but rather reusing those resources. So integrated water management is one of the keys to achieving arguably the SDGs and we'll have a lot of discussion about this week. There's going to be a very interesting set of sessions on Thursday about basin connected cities, right? Integrated urban water management, we tend to look at the city level. What's the next level above that? Every city lives within a basin and it's connected to all the other cities and the agriculture within that basin. We need to be thinking in this more integrated service delivery water resources paradigm to our basin connected cities. Back down to the micro level, we also need to continue to be working on resource reuse and recovery. This is a double win for the SDGs. This is where we both remove hazards from the environment and where we return resources to the system. We return water nutrients and energy. This sort of recycling is maybe the micro aspect of IUWM or peri-urban integrated water resources management or what can connect the cities to their basins if you can recycle fertilizer, you can recycle cleaned wastewater back to agriculture. These are the connectors that we need to make for this more integrated and more effective water management of the future. We also have wonderful opportunities in information systems analytics and technology and we're hearing a lot about that this week as well. Everything from earth observation which can provide us information with specificity and ease of access that we've never seen before. The progress that we're making in terms of systems modeling to be able to have the computing power because it's not intuitive to look at these incredible interrelationships and how we can manage all the trade-offs that are inherent right down to water accounting which is something that my organization, IMI, works on where we really need to start keeping an account as you would in your own family checkbook or your own business of the water stocks and flows, what that water is being used for and the benefits that come from that use so that you can understand if you're allocating your water sustainably and to its best and most important uses. And the final point that I wanna bring to you today is just to remind us all how essential SDG 6 is to all of the other SDGs. Now I know you can't read any of that but there is a story of connection between water and all of the other SDGs and if we don't achieve SDG 6, we imperil so many others. Importantly, the first three SDGs and I know you've memorized them, poverty, food, health. Poverty, food, health, impossible without clean water and adequate reliable water. No explanation needed, arguably. A second cluster, sustainable cities and communities, climate action, we know in this room how central water is, water management is to the resilience of cities. If we wanna manage adaptation, if we want truly resilient cities, water needs to be at the heart of this, our governance systems, our information systems, et cetera. And finally, two of the SDGs on 14 is life below water as the oceans and 15 is life on land, its terrestrial ecosystems. If we really look at these ecosystems, we know that agricultural wastewater, municipal wastewater impact the quality of our terrestrial ecosystems and their essential drought, flood management as well. Similarly with regard to oceans, although we're all freshwater people, the avenue to the oceans is our rivers. That's where pollutants are flushed into the ocean. We know that eight million tons of plastic a year are delivered to the ocean through our rivers, the rivers that many of us are tasked to manage. And you've probably heard this statistic that by 2050, we expect to have more plastic in the ocean than fish. To keep that plastic out of the ocean, we begin with management on land and we begin with the management of our rivers as well. So this is a lot to think about, a lot to do, and I'd like to invite us all to think about three paradigms that we need to revisit. As we move from what we really see as this shift between the MDG world, where we're focused on service delivery, where our constraints, we conceived our constraints very much to be financing and infrastructure and the pipes to get the water where we needed it to be. And the SDG world, which recognizes that the resource itself is a constraint. Resource is scarce. It may be contaminated. It's extremely uncertain with climate change. So how do we adjust our paradigms to shift from a mindset of plenty, of where water is plenty but maybe capital is scarce, to one in which the resource needs to be managed? We need to do some rethinking around our water economics. We know how precious water is but we still don't treat it that way economically in terms of pricing, fees, allocation systems. We need to better signal the value of water for conservation, for sustainability, for greater efficiency and for appropriate allocation. We need to be rethinking our water engineering paradigms. We need to be shifting from this once through mentality of bringing the water in and flushing it out to the more circular system. To recognize that every time we make an investment in water infrastructure, it should be multipurpose and it should be putting water to as many appropriate uses as it can safely be done. And we need to be integrating more nature-based infrastructure into our engineering for quality of life, for the values that those ecosystems bring us and frankly for livability and the enjoyment of posterity of this extraordinary natural systems. And we need to think a little bit differently about our water management paradigm. We need to focus much more on effective governance and information-based trade-offs in the way that we manage the competition of water between different uses. We need to be much more adaptive, much more flexible and much more focused on governance, not just the delivery of the completion of infrastructure. So the summary is actually very clear. The summary of where we are in the SDGs and where we're headed is really pretty clear. We are not on track to meet SDG6, right? And if we fail to meet SDG6, we will really struggle with the other SDG goals. But we can, I think, I am optimistic that we can do great things with SDG6, not necessarily that we achieve the goals, but that we reconfirm our aspirations for the way we manage water and become more ambitious in the way we manage water, its quality, its quantity, its equity, the ecosystems, because we in this room, in this community of water practitioners, are those that need to become more ambitious to integrate the solutions that we're talking about all week here. Because we are the water managers, we're the water engineers, we're the scientists, and we're also the citizens who can and must shape our water future, as we hope to do this week. So I thank you very much.