The 2006 World Water Week has opened at the Stockholm City Conference Centre with the theme of "Beyond the River-Sharing Benefits and Responsibilities".

" 'Sharing benefits' is a future-oriented approach in water and development, because it means looking at water from the perspective of what can be derived from it, for whom and by whom, and not the water per se,"says Mr. Anders Berntell, Executive Director of Stockholm International Water Institute which organizes the event. "The World Water Week this year will explore the links between benefits, costs and responsibilities, for instance, in physical planning and infrastructure design, including water and sanitation services and pollution abatement."

Berntell says the Water Week will be a venue for the presentation of concrete examples of how problems of poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and gender inequality can in large measure be solved with water and sanitation as the key entry points.

The week emphasizes capacity-building, partnership-building and follow-up on the implementation of international processes and programmes in water and development. Participants are representing businesses, governments, the water management and science sectors, inter-governmental organizations, NGOs, research and training institutions, United Nations agencies and more.

Over 100 different organizations and programmes are on board as conveners or co-conveners of different activities and more than 1500 participants are expected from 100 countries including China. The week-long programme is comprised of plenary sessions, panel debates, workshops, seminars, side events, technical tours, exhibitions and prize ceremonies. Three Chinese school students from Shanghai, delegates from State Administration of Environment Protection and some NGO researchers also participated in the event.

This year's theme also focuses more on trans-boundary and trans-basin water contexts. How benefits from water are generated, distributed and shared in this context will help determine the overall welfare of both people and the planet in this century.

Global Water Partnership Senior Advisor Khalid Mohtadullah gave the Indian-Pakistan treaty in jointly using their rivers as a good example of sharing benefits from water. And the other example is that the only thing Palestinians and Israelis are sharing is also the river water. Experts believe that by further international cooperation in sharing the benefit of water, it can contribute to solutions for conflict but not the cause of it. Countries like Angola, Namibia and Botswana in Southern Africa will share their story of how they benefit from cooperation in using the same river.

Further, three related sub-themes will explore the prospects for co-operation over shared waters, how land use affects water quality and quantity, and what can be done to cope with weather- and climate-related disasters.

"The landscape is the source and the sink for society's needs and wants, and it mirrors human ingenuity as well as ignorance,"says Professor Jan Lundqvist of SIWI, chair of the week's Scientific Programme Committee. "Natural resources use and waste disposal are intimately linked to human existence and must be managed more effectively."

The Stockholm meeting will look at natural disasters and society's vulnerability to the forces of Nature. While extreme events will come perhaps with greater frequency, it should be possible to plan and cope with emergencies and disaster situations so that suffering, loss of life and damage to property can be avoided on the scales as seen in the Tsunami aftermath, New Orleans and elsewhere.

Developing and managing water resources to help end poverty and hunger, feed an additional 2 billion people by 2030, while reversing trends of ecosystem degradation, is a most significant challenge. To answer questions in this field, the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture will reveal the results of its five-year critical evaluation of the benefits, costs and impacts of 50 years of water development for agriculture.

On Sunday, the Global Water Partnership (GWP) already began its activities in celebration of its 10th anniversary. And several seminars including the media role in environmental reports and economics in water management have also been held.

People's Daily Online's Stockholm Correspondent Chen Xuefei reports