Ministers and delegates have proposed Water to be the theme for the first cycle, particularly in the context of meeting the millennium development goal on water. Throughout the preparatory committee meetings towards the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), the NGO major group has stated that water is a crosscutting issue: ensuring water security can help us meet several of the millennium goals (MDGs) and help address many of the themes of the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPol): poverty eradication, sustainable production and consumption, and the protection of the natural resource base.

However, a word of caution: Achieving the MDG on water is not the same as putting in place a sustainable water use and management policy. They are linked to safe water security and can only be achieved by ensuring that crosscutting themes such as sustainable production and consumption and gender, is used in addition to biodiversity impact assessments in evaluating each proposal.