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Our Just Add Water campaign ran from July to December 2009, aiming to encourage governments at the Copenhagen climate summit to include the crucial issue of water in the negotiations.
For the world’s poorest people, climate change means water change – changes in rainfall patterns, droughts and floods. This water change puts livelihoods – and people’s ability to grow the food they need – at risk.
Our campaign asked climate change negotiators to prioritise the water sector in funding for climate change adaptation. It saw 2,340 people write postcards to their MPs.
Read our Just Add Water campaign leaflet (685k PDF) and see the postcard our campaigners sent.
This was backed up by media coverage, including a letter from our partner organisations published in The Guardian, and a blog on the BBC website’s Green Room.
We also ensured that voices from the global South were heard, bringing Angel Ibarra from our partner in El Salvador, the environmental organisation UNES, to the pre-summit negotiations in Barcelona.
Read Angel's views on why water is vital to sustainable management of the impacts of climate change; and his views on the real meaning of climate change for the impoverished people of developing countries.
And we enabled Fabiola Quishpe from Ecuador to attend the summit itself in Copenhagen. Read - in her own words - what Fabiola did in Copenhagen (131k PDF - one page extract from Progressio Annual Review 2010 2.81MB PDF).
In many ways, the outcome of the Copenhagen summit was a disappointment for people in developing countries - but our campaign helped to raise the visibility of the importance of water in tackling climate change.
And two years down the line, it seems the world is finally waking up to water.
Read more about what Progressio is doing on water and climate change.
