The conference will focus on determining areas of potential cooperation and consensus among Islamic states to raise awareness of the increasing threats to water resources in a changing environment.
“This first meeting will be confined to searching for points where we can agree on approaches to the care of water reserves. It will not involve itself in the politics of water,” said Ambassador Abdul Moiz Bokhari, assistant secretary general of the OIC.
He anticipated that the points of agreement would later lead to a unified policy on water management.
He recognized that water security was an issue of both local and global dimension and affected every aspect of human activity. With these aspects in mind, the 2009 meeting of ministers responsible for water, held during the 5th World Water Forum, directed the OIC General Secretariat to develop an overall vision for water. The result is the OIC Water Vision, which the 57 OIC member states endorsed in January this year.
Bokhari recalled that the 11th Islamic Summit Conference in 2008 recognized the need for special efforts to address issues including water, food security and sanitation.
“The forthcoming session in Istanbul will focus on activities for sharing experiences, best practices and capacity building,” he added.
Bokhari identified some of the areas included in the OIC Water vision as: the development of irrigation and agricultural potential; water conservation and water course management; the development of a network of hydro-meteorological monitoring stations to enable the better modeling of water systems and institutional reforms concerning water pricing and elated regulations.
The Istanbul conference will see the initial phase for developing the Water Vision. Water ministers will in these early stages review the possibilities for connecting centers of excellence in science, policy and water management. They will identify water problems, possible solutions and identify areas where the solution to water problems and security challenges might exist within the OIC countries.
In the longer term, the results of this early session will be reviewed by a Ministerial Water Vision Conference, which, Bokhari hoped, would form the basis for taking water-related collaboration among OIC member states to a higher level.
