Tania Strauss, head food and water at the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Nature and Climate, on water scarcity challenges
It’s easy to recognize water scarcity in times of drought, but how can we manage rising demand for it from things like data centers and manufacturing as well as population growth?It’s often invisible, but water is vital for industry and society in terms of our health and running our economies and our cities. Just starting to think about the wider water or hydrological cycle being off-kilter, which science is showing us that it is, has a far-reaching impact in ways I think people haven't properly understood. When you're thinking about trends in the consumption of water, you have to look at the bigger picture and say we're experiencing the water cycle being off-kilter–through too much due to flooding and unpredictable weather patterns, extreme weather, or too little water, both in the form of scarcity and in the changing ways in which we can access it. And then, too, polluted water, which in developing countries can be in the form of wastewater that's going untreated and in developed countries can be in the form of contamination of drinking water. It's really touching on literally every industry, every community, every country. Having that wider narrative on the issues around water is important. When you start to get into the consumption trends, 70% plus of water consumption is going into producing our food. The rest is being pushed around for industrial use, and that has challenges. The third is really around cities. If you go industry by industry and start to look at what that means, there is the kind of classic competition for almost every basin on earth from industries like mining and agriculture and manufacturing. Then you have some of these emerging industries that are starting to both operate in water-stressed regions and use water within the ingredients of their business model, like fast fashion, AI and data centers. There’s growing pressure, and we know now that in the next five years, by 2030, we're going to exceed our supply of water with an increased 40% in demand. So how do we reconcile the kinds of solutions that help us reinvent water management and also use much more circular thinking in the way we are approaching some of those problems?
What’s the answer? Companies have been more and more cognizant of their footprint, not only in terms of the water they're using within their supply chains but the fact that the communities and the basins where they now need to go and operate are so under stress that they're just not going to have that access. So even though [government] policy may or may not be addressing some of that, you are starting to see it on the industry side, whether it's concrete, whether it's energy or manufacturing, I think they have a little bit more of a real understanding of the cost of water and maybe in a better version of this in the future, the value of water. We need to look at this both around the governance of water, around the fit for purpose finance needed for water, the basin level or sort of waterway specific partnerships that need to happen, at least on the industry side in a pre-competitive way. Then also looking at the tools and the technologies, the policy nexus that can help enable new early-stage tech, but also innovation more broadly toward those outcomes. In terms of sparks of hope, where we're seeing good innovation, I think it's on a number of fronts. One is less sexy, which is that we need cooperation to happen. It isn't some breakthrough, deep-tech solution. We just need people to recognize that they have skin in the game, and they need to come around the table and solve for this. |
