New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 2 - Spring 2015 | Page 2

New Water Policy and Practice - Volume 1, Number 2 - Spring 2015

Editorial Welcome
Welcome to the second issue of New Water Policy and Practice Journal: A platform for
the world’s emerging water leaders and thinkers.

O

n 22nd March 2015 – the 22nd World Water Day – the United Nations released
its World Water Development Report: Water for a Sustainable World. In his
Foreword, Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, referred to the fact
that this report “…illustrates the complex linkages between water and critical areas such
as human health, food and energy security, urbanization, industrial growth and climate
change.” In her foreword, Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, also noted that
the report “…comes at a critical moment, when freshwater resources face rising pressure to
provide for the social, economic and environmental needs of a growing world population”.
She also noted “More than two decades after the first summit on sustainable development,
many countries still face the challenges of eliminating poverty and promoting economic
growth, ensuring health and sanitation, preventing land degradation and pollution, and
advancing rural and urban development. Around 748 million people today still do not
have access to an improved source of drinking water, and water demand for manufacturing
is expected to increase by 400 per cent between 2000 and 2050 globally.”
As pressure on the world’s water resources increases, the issues are growing and
connecting, changing from local to regional and even global challenges. These
interconnections at all scales are increasingly the focus of attention for the world’s water
managers and the communities that their work aims to support. The need for new
water leaders and innovations in water management is abundantly apparent.
It is with great pleasure, therefore, that this second issue of New Water Policy and
Practice Journal leads with a feature article Understanding Six Water Leadership Roles:
A framework to Help Build Leadership Capacity by André Taylor, Wouter T. Lincklaen
Arriëns and Mathew Lang. In this extended paper, the authors describe six leadership
roles that often feature in processes of change that drive more sustainable forms of
water management. They argue that understanding these roles can help to build the
leadership ability of emerging water leaders and therefore the capacity of the water sector
to drive change. We congratulate Andre, Wouter and Mathew on their contribution to
water leadership and note with great interest that their framework is now being used
to inform the design of water leadership development programmes around the world.
Water leadership development is a critically important field and we encourage readers
of New Water Policy and Practice Journal to contribute further papers on this topic for
our next edition in November 2015.
In the second paper in this issue, Nehwon Macpherson David and Amos T. Kabo-bah
evaluate the water quality risks in the Burl river basin, Liberia, a valuable freshwater
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