Brussels, 17th October 2012 – The European Commission is deliberately promoting privatization of water services as one of the conditions being imposed as part of bailouts, it acknowledged in a letter to civil society groups on 26 September 2012.[1] EU Commissioner Olli Rehn's directorate was responding to questions posed in an open letter concerning the European Commission’s role in imposing privatisation through the Troika in Greece, Portugal and other countries.[2] The civil society groups have today written to Commissioner Rehn to demand that he stop “any further pressure to impose water privatisation conditionalities”.[3]

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Translation in English of an article from Reporterre

Les rivières aériennes de vapeur issues de la forêt amazonienne jouent un rôle capital pour le climat. CC BY-NC-ND@Neil Palmer/Ciat/Cifor

To avoid climate collapse, it will not be enough to reduce the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It will also be necessary to protect forests and soils from deforestation and intensive agriculture, because the water cycle is also very important for climate regulation. We are just beginning to understand that.

Shortly after the New York Convention (1992), which launched the process of conferences on global warming, scientific publications drew attention to the “air rivers” which are steam or water vapour currents very active for rainfall. Initially called tropospheric rivers, these «aerial rivers» are created by the evaporation of the oceans and by the evapotranspiration of the great forests of Amazonia, Congo, Siberia.

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The Platform for Public and Community Partnerships of the Americas (PAPC) held the Horizons of Public and Community Water Management Meeting on September 25, 26, 27, 2023 in the city of Popayán, Cauca, Colombia, to share knowledge and experiences and allow us to renew our understandings of new and old strategies of water dispossession and privatization and to confront, organize and fight against them.

People, organizations and movements from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia met over three days in the capital of the Department of Cauca, paying homage to this Territory which sits at the confluence of centuries of struggles by Indigenous Peoples and Black and peasant communities in defense of land, cultures and water. But we regret to note that some of our comrades from Africa and Asia could not be here because of the injustice and racism that characterizes international mobility through the arbitrary and inequitable granting of visas and travel permits. We deplore the barriers to entry into Colombia for our compañerxs from the global South which demonstrate that international mobility is controlled by racist and colonial forces that limit the possibilities of face-to-face solidarity between formerly colonized peoples. We will insist on breaking down barriers, meeting and strengthening the exchanges of the peoples of the South.

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The European Water Movement (EWM) was at the 2022 European Summer University of Social Movements (ESU) in Mönchengladbach forging ties with European organisations.

The ESU held in Germany, Mönchengladbach, from 17th to 21st of August, 2022, was a very engaging event where hundreds of activists from social movements in Europe and other parts of the world shared experiences, ideas, initiatives for a different world. In this context we as the EWM presented and discussed two workshops on water, a commons presently under threat of liberistic policies of commodification, privatization and appropriation.

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