Water and Ethics
This essay is one of a series on Water and Ethics published under the International Hydrological Programme of UNESCO. A Working Group on the Use of Fresh Water Resources was established under that programme in 1998. Preliminary drafts on fourteen aspects of this topic were prepared under the guidance of this Working Group.
An extended executive summary was prepared by J. Delli Priscoli and M.R. Llamas and was presented to the first session of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST) held in Oslo in April 1999. At the latter meeting, COMEST established a sub-commission on the Ethics of Fresh Water under the Chairmanship of Lord Selborne. The first meeting of this sub-commission was held at Aswan in October 1999. A 50-page survey by Lord Selborne on the Ethics of Fresh Water, based on the above meetings and documents, was published by UNESCO in November 2000.
Since then, the original draft working papers have been revised under the editorship of James Dooge and published on CD ROM as an input to the Third World Water Forum held in Kyoto in March 1993. These are now being published in printed form as the first fourteen titles in a series of Water and Ethics.
These essays are written from the point of view of experts on different aspects of the occurrence and use of fresh water who are interested in the ethical aspects of this important subject. They do not purport to be authorative discussions of the basic ethical principles involved. Rather, they aim at providing a context for a wide-ranging dialogue on these issues between experts in diverse disciplines from the natural sciences and the social sciences.
