In United Nations water conference: Summary and main documents A. K. Biswas (Ed.), During the 1970s, the United Nations (UN) held a series of world conferences at high political levels on specific topics, to enhance global awareness of the magnitudes and extents of the problems and to formulate strategies to solve them. The UN Secretary General when the Water Conference was approved was Kurt Waldheim. Normally, all the world conferences that the UN held, between 1972 and 1981, had special Secretary Generals from outside the UN system, at a high political level. [Extracted from the article]