UN-Water Annual Report 2022

Foreword to the UN-Water Annual Report 2022 by Mr. Gilbert F. Houngbo, Director-General of the International Labour Organization and Chair of UN-Water:

"Last year was dominated by laying the ground for the UN 2023 Water Conference.

Throughout 2022, we provided intensive support to UN DESA, the Water Conference’s Secretariat, and to the two co-hosts – the Republic of Tajikistan and the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Our role, as the UN’s coordination mechanism on water and sanitation, was to help maintain the UN system’s focus on the Conference’s promise to be inclusive, action-oriented and cross-sectoral.

The UN-Water family drew on the outcomes of the SDG 6 Special Event, UN-Water meetings and other key preparatory activities to set the themes for the five Interactive Dialogues and generate momentum behind the forthcoming Water Action Agenda – the collection of all water-related voluntary commitments to accelerate progress in the second half of the Water Action Decade and the 2030 Agenda.

UN-Water increased its support to countries, through the reformed UN Resident Coordinator system and Country Teams, as a central part of our focus on enabling the UN system and Partners to help strengthen governments’ delivery towards SDG 6. National engagement will remain at the heart
of our work to drive transformative change in how we collectively support countries’ efforts on SDG 6 and build national capacity to accelerate change.

As we conducted the midterm review of UN-Water’s Integrated Monitoring Initiative for SDG6, we were delighted to learn that countries that have received extensive support and engaged in interactions

with specific agencies or with IMI-SDG6 generally exhibit greater engagement, stronger and more sustainable capacity, and better reporting rates.

On the communications front, our campaigns in 2022 were based on the theme of ‘Groundwater’. Backed by the UN World Water Development Report, the messages around World Water Day and World Toilet Day centred on the vast potential of this precious resource and warned of its mismanagement and abuse. This culminated in the UN-Water Summit on Groundwater – the first of its kind – which called on governments and other stakeholders to make groundwater-related commitments as part of the Water Action Agenda.

As the year came to a close, a moment of great significance occurred. For the first time, the declaration from the United Nations Climate Change Conference included ‘water’. Not only was this a breakthrough in the integration of climate and water action, but it was also a sign of the unprecedented consensus around the need to mainstream water into all intergovernmental processes – an avenue UN-Water will continue to pursue in the year ahead."