Water ministers from more than a hundred countries passed up the chance to compose an action plan for supplying basic water services to the world's poorest people. They also failed to endorse demands for a more ecological approach to managing the world's water.

"There is nothing here that will make a difference to anyone," says Ger Berkamp of IUCN, the World Conservation Union, referring to the forum's closing declaration.

The UN World Summit in Johannesburg in September set the world a target - to provide a billion people with modern sanitation, and half a billion with clean drinking water, over the next 12 years. Many delegates believed that this was the perfect arena to begin making that promise a reality.

But the ministers produced 27 paragraphs of compromises. "We had a long discussion about dams," said one official, "but some people were sensitive, so we called them reservoirs instead."

Even the water ministers complained when they saw the final result. "We are ministers, but we sound very half-hearted and unsure. We keep saying 'we should' rather than 'we will'," said the head of the Lesotho delegation.

The declaration failed on many levels. It did not declare access to water a human right, nor did it demand that countries on international rivers negotiate treaties on sharing their waters, or even insist that communities are consulted before their homes are flooded for dams. Unbelievably, it said nothing on climate change. "It's a step backwards," said Jamie Pittock of WWF. "The environment is the source of our water, but many water ministers still see it as an inconvenience that water has to be set aside for nature."

The declaration is "very, very weak" and fails the poor, says UN public health veteran Sir Richard Jolly, chairman of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council. "It says nothing about reallocating finance in favour of technologies that can help the poorest of the poor - to hand pumps and wells and rainwater harvesting and basic toilets."

But despite being ignored by ministers, scientists did make some progress in charting the path towards a "blue revolution". In other words, transforming world water use via ecological principles and staving off predicted chronic water shortages.

One of the "blue" ideas is that ecosystems such as wetlands have to be protected because they provide innumerable services, from fisheries and irrigation to flood protection and water storage, says Achim Steiner of the IUCN. And it is all free of charge. Steiner cites a 60-hectare wetland in Uganda that provides sewage treatment for Kampala that would otherwise cost $15 million a year. In sessions on the ecological approach to flooding, delegates were told the best approach is to tear down or set back flood dykes and allow rivers to reclaim parts of their natural flood plain. Dykes, it was argued, exacerbated last summer's floods in central Europe.

In their different ways, some governments claim to be acting for ecological good - to protect biodiversity by maintaining flows in rivers, for instance. Bizarrely, China, home of some of the world's largest water projects, claimed that the $60-billion project starting this year to siphon off large flows from the Yangtze in southern China into the northern Yellow river is ecologically inspired. Wang Hao of the country's Institute of Water Resources insisted that 10 cubic kilometres of the transferred water will go to ensuring that the Yellow river no longer dries up entirely, and reaches the sea even in the worst droughts.

Engineers and ecologists were divided over how UN targets should be met. Toilets, it turns out, can be ecological, too. UN development agencies and the mainstream water industry talked about finding the cash to connect up hundreds of millions of people to Western-style sewers. The water to flush the toilets would come from a new generation of large dams that Forum chairman and Egyptian water minister Mahmoud Abu-Zeid called for as the conference kicked off (New Scientist, 22 March, p 11).

But many took a different approach. Several conference sessions discussed the potential for "ecological sanitation" - new designs for dry toilets that need no flushing and don't pollute rivers with sewage. Instead they compost faeces and collect urine for recycling to fertilise fields.

And some called for even more basic solutions. Around the world, more people squat at pit latrines each morning than use flushing toilets, said Graham Alabaster of the UN's Nairobi-based settlements agency, Habitat. "Forget ecological sanitation. What we really need is better latrines. In Nairobi, a local builder is making simple concrete bases to stop the latrine edges washing away in the rains. Nothing could be simpler, but it could make life better for millions of people every day."

Fred Pearce
Kyoto