September 26, 2012
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.
Photo: Secretary of State Clinton joins a roundtable discussion on water, peace and security at the United Nations. Courtesy of Michael Gross and the U.S. State Department.
More from CNAS
-
Why Stopping Environmental Crime Is a Matter of National Security
Commentary
Last week, the presidency of the Financial Action Task Force, the global intergovernmental standard-setter for combatting illicit financial threats, passed from China to Germa...
By Neil Bhatiya
-
Can Tariffs and Sanctions Lead to a Better Climate Change Strategy?
Commentary
A little more than two years since he announced in the Rose Garden that the United States was “getting out” of the Paris climate change agreement, President Donald Trump was i...
By Neil Bhatiya
-
Climate Change: The New Asian Drama
Commentary
When the Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote his magisterial three volume study of postwar economic and political development in Asia, he questioned whether ...
By Neil Bhatiya
-
Why Abandoning Paris Is a Disaster for America
Ever the showman, President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday about his soon-to-be-announced decision on whether or not to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement with the air of...
By Julianne Smith
