UNESCO to hold an online Pre-Conference event on water, megacities and global change

UNESCO aims to respond to the need of initiating discussion on the identified challenges and solutions related to water, megacities and global change through an online pre-conference event from 7 to 11 December 2020.

The Second International Conference on “Water, Megacities and Global Change” (EauMega 2021) will take place in December 2021 at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, 6 years after its first edition, also known as EauMega 2015. The conference will bring together scientists, operators, policy makers and civil society to address water security and global challenges in Megacities. It was initially planned for December 2020 but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Against this background, UNESCO Division of Water Sciences, Association Recherche Collectivités dans le domaine de l’EAU (ARCEAU-IdF), Syndicat interdépartemental pour l’assainissement de l’agglomération parisienne (SIAAP) and the Greater Paris Metropolis, will co-organize an online pre-conference event to start sharing experiences, initiate the discussions and maintain the strong interest towards EauMega2021.

The Pre-Conference event will take place from 7 to 11 December 2020 via ZOOM and UNESCO Youtube official channel. 30 papers will be presented by their authors in this Online Pre-Conference. Two thematic sessions per day will take place, starting at 13:00 (CET time), to enable as many people as possible from all over the world to join the conference. Daily sessions will have an average duration of approximately 2 hours.

Participants will be invited to take an active role in this event by asking questions to the panelists. To facilitate this interaction, full papers of the presenters are available on the conference website. We strongly invite participants to consult them beforehand in order to better understand some of the issues at stake within the themes to be presented and discussed.