Your Royal Highness, Mr President, Honoured guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. The Inaugural Zayed Prize Jury has bestowed a deep honour upon the World Commission on Dams, and it is my pleasure to accept, on the Commission's behalf, your generous award and recognition.

Let me thank his highness Sheikh Zheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, in whose name, vision and development philosophy we are so honoured. Also our co-awardee in the category, University of Cairo Prof. Mohamed El-Kassas, is an outstanding scientist and conservationist whose work has had an impact far beyond Eygpt.

Let me finally thank Crown Prince of Dubai Mohamed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who recognised that "dams are not only major water management projects, but they have a considerable impact on socio-economic development and the environment."

It takes vision to see the cause and effect of large dams at home, and even greater vision to recognise dam tensions abroad. Dubai is one of the few places on earth with no social, economic or environmental controversies surrounding large dams. I had thought this happy situation was due entirely to the leadership in your kingdom, or from the skill of your engineers, or the foresight of your development planners. Each is, no doubt, a key factor. Yet as my Secretary-General pointed out, it may also involve the absence of any large dams here.

Be that as it may, I suspect the people and leaders of Dubai know something about resource scarcity. About how a nation's search for water and energy security can raise tensions both within, and between, borders. And about incentives to find how, in the face of limits, we can work together to unlock the best approach for all.

Finding that "best approach" is never easy. We live in an age of Relativism - in beauty, politics, truth, values. Yet we are beginning to recognise that while moral relativism grows, another truth remains absolute: In arid countries, with more many thirsty people, we face an absolute limit of water. That limit is not subject to change. We may disagree about the quality or use of our water, but we can agree on the fact that no one's making more of it.

As former water Minister, and as Chair of the WCD, we had to face the hard, yet absolute truth that on this deceptively blue planet, less than 2.5% of our water is fresh, less than 33% of fresh water is fluid, less than 1.7% of fluid water runs in streams. Compounding that shortage, one in five people world-wide still lacks access to safe drinking water. Half the world lacks sanitation; millions die from waterborne disease. Farmers compete for water with booming but stressed cities. Towns drain aquifers that took centuries to fill. Saltwater pollutes groundwater miles from the sea. In a few decades, one in three may struggle to drink or bathe.

Yet already we have dammed half our world's rivers at unprecedented rates of one per hour, and at unprecedented scales of over 45 000 dams more than four stories high. Rivers seldom run, but loiter in a chain of reservoirs. In some years our mightiest rivers - Africa's Nile, Asia's Yellow, America's Colorado, Australia's Murray - do not reach the sea.

As one who authorised the next stage of one of the largest dams in the Southern Hemisphere I can argue that nations build large dams for sound reasons. Dams store, use and divert water for consumption, irrigation, cooling, transportation, construction, mills, power and recreation. Dams remove water from the Ganges, Amazon, Danube, Nile or Columbia to sustain cities on their banks. For parting - or imparting - the waters, dams are our oldest tool. Yet are they our only tool, or our best option?

Surprisingly such a determination has rarely been attempted. Yet this century we have collectively bought, on average, one large dam per day, and there have been precious few, if any, comprehensive, independent analyses as to why dams came about, how dams perform, whether we are getting a fair return from our $2 trillion investment.

But many do ask whether the absolute limits of water requires more or fewer dams, or indeed whether, water scarcity inevitably locks peoples, regions and nations in a fierce, competitive struggle in which we race to the bottom in fear and self-interest. If so, they maintain, when rivers cross borders within or between nations, water scarcity leads to water stress which leads to water wars.

While that scenario is dark, the question is not an idle one, especially here in arid North Africa and the Middle East. Yet our Commission, and through it, this Final Report, contradicts the overall sense of desperation and despair. We see water as an instrument, a catalyst for peace, that brings us together, neither to build dams nor tear them down but to carefully develop resources for the long term through whichever tools serve both human and natural communities.

Yet we then go several steps further. One of our Seven Strategic Priorities is to share waters across boundaries. Our framework seeks to ensure that no single nation, weak or powerful, can restrict another country from sharing that same trans-boundary river basin, or aquifer. And the Report sets in place clear, proven, rigorous criteria and guidelines to ensure this cooperation is not only possible, but also more likely. Likely here in the Middle East, and indeed, all over the world.

How did we unanimously reach such a progressive conclusion? Neither through blind optimism, nor by ignoring the reality of water scarcity, nor by distorting the evidence to fit our relative human needs. We reached it, ironically, by embracing that absolute truth of water limits, then adapting our relative human needs and decisions to it.

The Crown Prince kindly called our process a "standard for addressing other complex environmental problems." Others have called it a "model for decision-making." We're flattered, of course, but cannot take the credit. We can only share it, along with its story. For "the WCD Way" emerged, literally, from a thousand mothers and fathers from every sector and outlook:

In response to escalating conflicts over the role of dams in development, all those constituents established the World Commission on Dams. All had something to lose, and something to gain. Demand for water and energy was up, of course, but investment in dam infrastructure was in decline. Development assistance for large dams decreased from $4.4 billion per year in the early 1980s to $2.6 billion per year in the 1990s.

Over two and a half years, the WCD conducted the most comprehensive, global and independent review of large dams to date, and used this review as a basis for its recommendations. The full WCD Knowledge Base comprises of 8 in-depth case studies, 3 country studies, a cross-check survey of 125 dams, 17 thematic reviews, 130 contributing papers, 4 regional consultations and 950 submissions.

Many felt that the contested nature of the dams debate would pull the Commission apart. However, the twelve Commissioners from diverse backgrounds developed an understanding and approach based on mutual respect that saw them through many contested discussions. The result was not a bland compromise document, but rather an innovative framework within which to examine dams - both existing and planned.

Launched under the patronage of Nelson Mandela in November 2000, the Commission's final report, Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision Making, consists of two components - the 'global review' and the 'way forward'. The global review concentrates on the performance of dams and presents an integrated assessment of when, how and why dams succeed or fail in meeting their objectives.

The 'way forward' provides a new framework for decision-making based on a recognition of rights and an assessment of risks. Seven strategic priorities and corresponding policy principles for water and energy resources development show how to: gain public acceptance; assess options; address existing dams; sustain rivers and livelihoods; recognise entitlements and secure benefits; ensure compliance; and share rivers across boundaries. Practical guidance on implementing these priorities is provided through a set of criteria for five key decision points in the planning and project cycle together with a set of 26 guidelines based on examples of good practice from around the world.

The WCD found that dams delivered real and substantial benefits to society at large:

• in 63 countries, hydropower provides more than half of the electricity;
• dams contribute to 12-16 percent of worlds food,

...but the toll exacted from rural communities (+40 million displaced), taxpayers ($2 trillion spent) and the natural environment (+50 percent of all rivers dammed) to pay for those benefits was both unacceptable and often unnecessary.

Unacceptable: because all too often, human rights were ignored, communities uprooted without equity, benefits shifted from rural poor to urban industries, irreversible impacts impaired a watershed's ability to sustain current societies, let alone future generations.

Unnecessary: because with a new, inclusive, transparent and negotiated approach to decisions, dams or their alternatives need not be as costly, controversial, disruptive, time consuming, inequitable, inefficient or damaging to natural resources.

Development must above all be people-centred, no matter age, class, creed or location. By bringing to the table all whose rights are involved and who bear the risks associated with different options for water and energy resources development, we create conditions for a positive resolution of conflicts and competing interests.

By first weighing all options, improving existing systems, and reaching decisions based on an inclusive framework of risks and rights among affected interests, all parties can dramatically increase performance, not only out of moral obligation to others, but to reduce time, money, conflict and resource impacts for themselves.

The WCD Way has, mercifully, not been universally embraced by those nations building more dams than, say, Dubai. I would have been deeply disappointed if the Commission did not provoke and challenge and ruffle feathers in its Report. It would have proven our work guilty of what I call "harmonious irrelevance."

Some felt this Report makes water use decisions even more difficult; by raising the bar higher, as we do, a government must exercise more energy and creativity to reach a sustainable result. But in truth we make those decisions easier; for we show clearly which, how, where and why decisions can either work well or fail to deliver.

Some blame the messenger for a decline in dam construction - a situation it did not create. Others blame the messenger for not influencing or stopping dam decisions - a mandate it did not have or seek.

But the messenger -- the Commission -- no longer exists to blame or to act. All that remains is the WCD model, and the WCD message; our process and our product. I affirm the integrity of both, and assert that both represent something new, and perhaps enduring, in this age of fleeting and unstable Relativism.

Before WCD, hundreds of books and publications informed the dams and development debate from one side or another. Written by single authors, they say much but resolve little. The WCD Final Report is meaningful, and will be remembered, not just for what it says, but for the fact that several hundred diverse men and women were directly involved in saying it. It is sculpted by the expertise of members of the Commission, many of whom have devoted their entire lives to engineering, environmental, social and institutional concerns of rivers and dams. All of us were sensitive to the needs of human development as we listened to the aspirations, the pain and the anguish of individual people.

What I am driving at, is that our "Truth" and authority embodied in the WCD process and Final Report, is not, of course, Absolute. But neither is it merely another example of Relativism. It stands against those previous relativistic truths of individual special interests who interpret dams according to their own narrowly defined local, financial, personal, temporal, ecological, global, ideological, institutional, academic, economic, social, or technical angles.

Perhaps now, after a century of deconstruction, we can begin to build back up a new, broader-based and inclusive framework for actions, for development, for decision-making. A framework that is global in scope, but local its authority, a multi-stakeholder decision that brings about a single outcome, an authority that comes from below, rather than from above. In that way we can meet the coming water scarcity with confidence and assurance, knowing that water is not for fighting over. Water is for conserving. Water is for bathing. Water is for drinking. Water is for sharing. Water can be our catalyst for peace.

May the generosity, philosophy and prominence of the Zayed Prize, now and in the future, continue to flow and nourish that peace. I thank you.