One Water Summit à Riyad : le discours introductif du Président Emmanuel Macron.

Monsieur le prince héritier d'Arabie Saoudite, cher Mohamed bin Salman, merci. Monsieur le Président, les ministres et les convois et les ambassadours, les Excellences, les représentants de l'international de l'organisation de l'université, les entreprises, les entreprises et les sociétés. Merci d'avoir été ici avec nous aujourd'hui dans ce summit en Riyadh, à la même temps où le premier, où le Coup Dessertification Summit a commencé. First of all, I'd like to thank you very much, Your Highness. I'd like to thank His Majesty the customer of the two holy mosques for us here in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Water so far has always been a secondary challenge in the issue of combating change in climate, but we shouldn't forget numbers and facts. And I'd like to remind you that 9 out of 10 cases, the challenge of adaptation relies on water, scarcity of water, availability of water, the changes in the courses of water, which makes it difficult to anticipate the availability of water. Water is basic and fundamental in all adaptation efforts. Year after year, 12 million hectares of lands are lost every year, which makes us lose our ability to find food and our ability to change deserts into agricultural land, which exacerbates the problem of climate and the problem of biodiversity.

So water is connected to and internally related to desertification combating. 60% of water is transborders, so we cannot solve this problem on a national level. The borders do not work well with the water basins, so water needs to be considered a common or a giant ownership or property. We find that a lot of conflicts are based on water. Now, one person out of four cannot find good fresh water. One person out of two in the world faces shortage of water every year, while water is a fundamental right of all humans. And the most vulnerable sectors are the most damaged ones. Every year, women and girls spend 200 million hours searching for water all over the world.

In all of the regions where water is scarce, there is more injustice against women and girls. So this summit, this conference about water sounds very logical for all of us and logical. So we need to work on the investment in water. So the $1 invested in the ability of water to confront the negative conditions means that we will be able to save $4 of health costs and healthcare expenditure. Because of the productivity increase that we will be able to achieve. That's why France started to work on this path. And we adopted the national plan to reduce consumption by 10% by the year 2030.

And we relied on science and on climate conditions in order to anticipate all possible scenarios, even if the world temperature goes up by four degrees. And we want to work on all levels, innovation, technology, creativity. And France so far has dedicated more than $10 million in the national and the French agency for development. And we spent 2 million of them in 2023. On the international level, in order to achieve the SDGs goals, we need to achieve five basic things. First, knowledge and science. The climatic change changed the course of water. So we need to have more right and correct data and good models to take the right decisions.

And I'm very happy and like also from my heart to thank all convoys who worked and invoys who worked very well. And I'm happy to start today the One Vision Alliance from the scientific institutions and the international organizations in order to work together to share information and data from the satellites and all the data that are needed. Another thing that we need to do is to work on the development of technology and to disseminate technology and spread it, especially in the field of water desalination and the reuse of water in order to avoid excessive use of fresh water and to have the ability to create in these two fields and to be able to disseminate and spread these technologies.

This is a basic challenge. And this is in the heart of our national conveyor project that is developed by Jordan and supported by France along with other partners. Access to water is important and basic for agriculture and food security and for the world food program. And that the WFP knows that and this is also in the heart of the Inga project that is implemented by the by DRC. So the second point is technologies technologies that we should distribute. The third point is related to the use of a more responsible use of water from all parties, including the private sector. I'd like to thank the businesses that worked with us in this summit.

We need to consume less water and in a better manner in order to confront the excessive use of water and the waste of water. We need to rationalize and use better water resources in rural areas and all areas. And we need to do all what needs to be done in order to avoid the pollution of water. We have participated with the negotiations in the negotiations of the plastic agreement. The fifth round was concluded and percent and processing plastic is important if we want to preserve water. The fourth point is to take in consideration the most vulnerable populations. France committed to this to this topic in 2023. We signed our call for the wash road map.

In order to work on the improving of access to water, to sanitary, to health care and the vulnerable areas and areas of conflict. One of the main goals was to assign a special envoy for water for the night conditions. Ms. Marsudi was appointed to that. In conclusion, Your Royal Highness, the point of the wise rationalization of what use of water on all of the aspects. All governments of the world and governmental entities and organizations in the world and the private sector need to participate in that. And I want to welcome and congratulate the water finance coalition that gathers more than 60 banks of 60 development banks.

And the members of that network committed to dedicating more than 50 billion dollars for the for these water issues. We want to launch a new coalition that gathers on the same table countries, local authorities, big companies of technology and financers and funders who provided these amounts of money so far in order to find solutions based on the needs. Especially water desalination and also to provide the technology needed for all those who need them and also to provide financing for people or for those who need. This is what happened.

What Morocco did in the water project there and Morocco could mobilize all the technologies needed to confront the challenges in the rural areas and cities there. We need this kind of coalition, the water coalition. We the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, France, Kazakhstan, the World Bank and all those here immediately after this summit. We need to start building a new water coalition and all people who are interested can participate. It's open for all. So we direct our call for people who have the good will all over the world to come with us in 2025 where we will celebrate the Paris Agreement in its 10th anniversary and to participate with us with the United Nations Water Conference.

We want it to be a success. Yes, thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. You're well, Hannes, for this receiving. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We'll see.