Urban runoff from heavy downpours releases a vast amount of water that is lost, pollutes, and causes flooding. Controlling this water that cannot flow through impermeable soil and taking advantage of its enormous potential is one of the keys to the regenerative city envisaged in SDG 11.

Leonardo da Vinci once wrote that water is the blood of the Earth and rivers its veins. It is perhaps the best metaphor ever written about water. Nothing is more linked to life than river water: life for us and life for nature. Rivers that have lost the life within them are the worst symptom of the Earth's health. We have selected five short films in which the We Art Water Film Festival participants give extraordinary testimony.

Solving the dichotomy between the value and price of water is essential to face a future of significant water risks. Efficient management and raising public awareness of the importance of the water cycle are tools that will allow us to reach an international consensus in the face of the threat of overpopulation and climate change. On World Water Day, we discussed the value and price of water in the World Majlis at the Expo 2020 in Dubai.

Uncontrolled urban growth destroys water around it, creating a serious supply problem. Many cities around the world need to search for water further and further away. In the short film Los Conductores del Agua - The Drivers of Water, a micro-documentary finalist at the We Art Water Film Festival 5, the so-called “piperos”, the water carriers, bear witness to this problem in the Mexican city of Morelia.

They treat wastewater with solar energy, capture CO₂ and transform pollutants into valuable compounds. Moreover, they reproduce on their own and can collaborate in water disinfection. They are microalgae, plants we still know very little about, which can surely provide many benefits to sustainable sanitation without technological gaps.

The more we know about environmental problems, the more global solutions become. The water footprint of economic activity is closely linked to the carbon footprint, and both have an impact on the ecological footprint. The goal of reducing greenhouse gases should take hydric stress into consideration in a global approach that is essential to achieve efficiency and justice.

Migration due to poverty, violence and neglect has led to the overcrowding of hundreds of thousands of people within a few kilometers of the center of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. The causes of the creation of slums follow a universal pattern that show us where to find the shortcomings of the universal justice we wish to create. The short filmRaindrops, by Stephen Okoth, finalist of the We Art Water Film Festival 5, recreates a real common story in Kibera and in all marginal neighborhoods around the world.

The listing of water rights in California on the Wall Street stock exchange has raised serious issues due to the negative influence it might have on the protection of the human right to water. It is the response of the free market to a scarce good that is subject to the ups and downs in availability and prices mainly due to the climate crisis and the increase in demand. It is a factor that opens the perspective to financial speculation and this must be avoided.