The annual World Water Week in Stockholm is the leading international forum on the theme of water and development. Within the scope of this year's event from 21 through to 27 August, Germany's Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) and its Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) organised a one-day seminar together with UN Water and the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) under the motto "Water in a Green Economy". In addition to intensive exchanges of views, experiences and practices with international partners of the Bonn2011 Nexus Conference, the forum ended by drawing up the Stockholm Statement to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20 Summit).
At the seminar "Water in a Green Economy", Franz Marré, the Head of BMZ's Division "Water, Energy; Urban Development, Geosciences sector", addressed the international audience and explained the substantive priority areas of the Bonn2011 Nexus Conference, emphasising the interfaces that exist between the Bonn2011 preparation process and the Stockholm World Water Week and the World Water Forum in Marseille, as well as the links to the UN Earth Summit "Rio+20". A member of the seminar's expert panel, Thomas Stratenwerth, Head of BMU's Division for "General, Fundamental, International and European Aspects of Water Management", underscored the need for an intersectoral "nexus perspective" in view of the joint challenges facing politicians and practitioners alike in the three sectors of water, energy and food.
In addition, other side-events at the Stockholm World Water Week provided an ideal setting for intensive coordination with the international partners of the Bonn2011 Nexus Conference. "Water, Energy and Food Security" was generally the overriding theme at the German booth whose mix of interactive elements, interviews and core statements gave attendees the chance to find out about the key aspects thus far in the lead-up to the Bonn Conference.
At the end of the one-week Stockholm event, whose thematic header was "Responding to Global Changes — Water in an Urbanising World", the 2,500 international participants issued the so-called {http://www.worldwaterweek.org/documents/WWW_PDF/2011/2011-Stockholm-Statement.pdf|"Stockholm Statement"} which calls on all levels of government leadership scheduled to participate at the United Nations' Conference on Sustainable Development — Rio+20 Summit — in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012 to commit to achieving "universal provisioning of safe drinking water, adequate sanitation and modern energy services by the year 2030" and to adopt hard-and-fast intervening targets by 2020. Furthermore, this statement strongly urges the international community of states to make the creation of an institutional framework for sustainable development one of its central goals and to thus lead the way to water, energy and food security in a green economy.
{http://www.worldwaterweek.org/|website of the "World Water WeeK"}
{http://www.worldwaterweek.org/documents/WWW_PDF/2011/2011-Stockholm-Statement.pdf|"Stockholm Statement"}