Check against delivery
Thank you, Mr. Chairman _– also for your leadership in guiding us through this important discussion.
Further to the statement made by Luxembourg on behalf of the European Union, I would like to make a few additional points.
The international environment related targets must be recognised as playing an instrumental role in the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. Environmental sustainability is closely linked with the development process. If environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated, our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain.
Worded in various ways, these same messages have been sent to us by all the reports prepared for the Millennium Review Summit.
CSD 13 must send a strong message on water, sanitation and human settlement. But it should also send a strong message to the Millennium Review Summit highlighting the need for integrating fully the concept of sustainable development into the review of the Millennium Development Goals.
Mr. Chairman,
It is crucial that we succeed in turning our political commitments into action. You also underlined that yourself a number of times in your interventions. The decisions made at CSD 13 must focus on a few key policy recommendations based on the key constraints identified under CSD 12 to the implementation of the targets on water, sanitation and human settlement.
Insufficient national ownership of the goals and targets was identified as a crucial constraint. A key policy recommendation from CSD 13 should therefore be that countries integrate the international goals on water, sanitation and human settlement in Poverty Reduction Strategies and national development plans. The implementation of such strategies and plans should be made a top priority at the country level with full commitment from the government as well as the donor community.
We need particularly to underline the importance of implementing the 2005 target on Integrated Water Resource Management. Implementation of this target is crucial to reach the targets on water and sanitation as well as other MDG’s and commitments from the Johannesburg Summit.
Finally, Mr. Chairman, monitoring and follow-up is necessary to ensure implementation. Another important outcome of CSD 13 is to agree on a concrete, ambitious and forward-looking mechanism for monitoring and follow-up. If we could also agree to link this mechanism to the one used for data collection and reporting on the MDG process, we have laid a good foundation for our future work.
Thank you.