UN 2023 Water Conference: water is life, but it’s also politics

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Giulio Boccaletti, author, Water: A Biography: Water came to Earth about three and a half billion years ago. It probably was carried on to the planet by asteroids. And ever since then, the quantity of water on this planet has remained fixed. So the problem with water is not one of absolute quantities. It is its distribution over time and how we experience it.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week: water. As the world gathers for the first UN water summit in a decade, we hear from someone who has written a biography of the Earth’s water, and our relationship with this substance vital to all life on Earth.

Giulio Boccaletti: For most of us who live in rich countries, water's disappeared from view. But it's coming back. As the climate system changes, water resurfaces, behind the levees, behind the dams, inside the canals. It's moving again.

Robin Pomeroy: That increase in floods and droughts all over the world has brought home to nearly all of us the power of water to disrupt our lives. And billions of people struggle to get enough water for at least one month every year, UN data shows. So when delegates meet at the United Nations in New York on 22-24 March 2023, they’ll have plenty to discuss.

Giulio Boccaletti: 10,000 years of history show us that, in fact, the fundamental question about managing water is political.

Robin Pomeroy: Subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts, or visit us at wef.ch/podcasts.

Giulio Boccaletti: In a way, it is a hopeful story because any problem we face is the result of choices we have made.

Robin Pomeroy: Is the water glass half empty or half full? I’m Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and with this look at water.

Giulio Boccaletti: Therefore any solution that we might bring can also be the result of choices that we make.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos.

Giulio Boccaletti is a scientist who has worked on climate dynamics and physical oceanography. He’s been a consultant for McKinsey, and was Global Managing Director for Water at the US-based global NGO, the Nature Conservancy. He co-founded the company Chloris Geospatial, which uses remote sensing and machine learning to measure forest carbon stock around the world - and works with the World Economic Forum’s UpLink platform which brings together innovative young companies to solve some of the world’s toughest problems.

He has also written a book called Water: A Biography, a history of how humanity’s relationship to water has shaped civilization, transformed political institutions, and defined people’s lives.

So who better to set the scene for the UN 2023 Water Conference which is happening this week?

My colleague Kateryna Gordiychuk spoke to Giulio Boccaletti and started by asking him what are the biggest challenges when it comes to water.

Giulio Boccaletti: Well, maybe the biggest challenge above all others is exactly that people don't know what the challenges are, that water is sort of invisible.

So the vast majority of people, certainly those who live in developed countries, we homo sapiens have developed a relationship, 10,000 years ago, when we decided to stand still, when we became sedentary in a world of moving water and ever since, our life on the landscape, our collective life on the landscape has been shaped by our relationship with water, which is essentially the agent of the climate system on the landscape.

It's the most powerful force that shapes the landscape on behalf of the climate system and transforms the world around us. The floods, the droughts, storms that power the atmosphere and fall on our heads. All of these things are expressions of water and the expressions of the climate system.

And for 10,000 years ago, we've been in this dielectric relationship with this giant. And it's a giant. It's an incredibly energetic giant. And then about a century ago, the promise of the modernist world was to separate us, to emancipate us from nature, and we replumbed the planets. That's essentially the reason why you and I and everybody else probably listening to this doesn't wade a river going to work every day is because we've transformed the landscape and turned the hydrology of the planets in hydraulics functional to supporting industrialisation. And in doing so, we created an illusion of control so that today nobody really thinks about water all that much.

But that illusion is breaking and that's the biggest challenge today. It's breaking and things are changing. The climate is on the move and water is changing with it. And we need to relearn what our relationship with water should be.

Kateryna Gordiychuk: And this is, of course, one of the main messages that you send in your book, Water: A Biography. What are the reasons? And you explain some of them, but more concretely, what are the reasons for redefining our relationship with water? Why is it so urgent today?

Giulio Boccaletti: Well, it's urgent because, you know, most people alive today have never really had to deal with water, certainly not people that live in developed countries, in rich countries that have transformed the landscape. Separate story for those who live in rural areas in the poorest countries of the world, where for them, water has always been a very present agent on their life.

But for most of us who live in rich countries, water's disappeared from view. But it's coming back. As the climate system changes, water resurfaces, behind the levees, behind the dams, inside the canals, it's moving again. The spectacular droughts that have hit Europe or the catastrophic floods that have hit places like Pakistan, but also places like South Korea.

And so as this happens, the biggest risk is that we end up believing that the problem is simply an engineering issue, that somebody, somewhere will take care of, and it's just a matter of spending money.

But 10,000 years of history show us that, in fact, the fundamental question about managing water is political. It’s the question of what should our home look like. And that is a quintessentially intrinsically political question that cannot be dealt with just through engineering. It requires participation and debate and politics with a big P.

I've written the story, the biography of water, to describe how all of our political institutions have developed and contained the DNA of our relationship with water. And the events of climate change will bring that politics back to the fore. And so we need to learn once again how to engage politically with questions of landscape, with questions of who decides what our home looks like and who gets to exercise power on the landscape. Because that, in a nutshell, is what dealing with water means.

Kateryna Gordiychuk: How we view water and the fact that it's not an engineering issue, but that it's a politics issue. It made me think about how today the use of water is not fair and it's often not equitable, right? So people who can pay money and get their hands on water, they will be able to do it. Governments will, companies will, but some of the others will be left behind. How can we think about that dilemma and what can we do about water becoming more of a right for everyone, not just rich countries and well-to-do countries?

Giulio Boccaletti: I think that the distributional questions surrounding water are profound and have been around for many, many years because water is, of course, a human right when it comes to water for drinking purposes. But it's also an economic input. It's required input. The most important thing you need for agricultural production, for example. If it's green and it grows, it requires water.

And then of course, it's also the thing that shapes the landscape more than any other. Floods create landscapes, grind down mountains, create coastlines.

And so it's all these things at once. And the exercise of managing water is ultimately an exercise of power. Somebody needs to build something somewhere in somebody's backyard to control and manage water resources. And so it's inevitably a question of power. And in the question of power, some will benefit and some will lose. The costs will be borne disproportionately by those with the least power.

We've seen this even in the dramatic droughts that have hit the Horn of Africa, 20 million people with essentially no political agency unable to mobilize their communities in the state, to transform the landscape in ways that protect them. The same has happened in Pakistan. It is the powerless that get hit by this.

So, yes, it's a matter of human rights and it's true that we should frame the question of water as a question of access. But it's more than that. It's also a question of exercising sovereignty over the landscape or achieving water security, which is much more than having access to water drink, it's about water that serves the purposes of development and of social cohesion.

And in that sense, the most powerful instrument that we have to have a just and equitable outcome is political emancipation, is the ability of people to be citizens in the management of the landscape in which they live.

That is the key. Over 10,000 years, that has always been the key to a successful management of water resources, and that will be the key to the management of water sources, even in a changing climate.

Kateryna Gordiychuk: Are there any examples that we can learn from of people managing their water resources and that leading to a better environment for them, a better community, a better ecosystem for them and everyone, everything living in that ecosystem?

Giulio Boccaletti: You know, there are many examples around the world, but one has to be careful because examples are always contextual. They're right for some people in some place at some point in time.

And one of the challenges with thinking with an engineering mindset in looking for solutions that can be generalised is that you take out the context, you take out the people, you take out the place, and you're left with a recipe. But the recipe is not always going to be right for everybody.

So there are examples in time. You know, arguably the progressive era of the United States in the 20th century was an enormous exercise in water management that led to development, that led to extracting people out of poverty. Exactly what happened to, say, China in the latter part of the 20th century, when the management of the landscape and the harnessing of the water resources of the Yangtze and the Yellow River delivered prosperity. They obviously had costs, costs that were then recognised by the subsequent generation. But there's no question that at the time there were incredible interventions, right for the time and for the people then.

Think of Israel and a case that's been brought up frequently. again, Israel made extraordinary investments not just in the water resources, in the management of water resources, but also in shaping the economy, the agricultural economy in particular, in order to be the most productive with the least amount of water. And that's an important lesson, but it's an important lesson in a democratic country that is specific to the conditions and to the culture, to the history of Israel - can't be simply taken out of context and applied somewhere else.

So, again, to me, the most universal solution to the problem of managing water, which is a narrow slice of the broader problem of managing environmental resources, is political agency. People need to be citizens in the landscapes in which they live. That is the key to developing legitimate solutions that are by definition, those that work, They’re right because they're the ones that people chose.

Kateryna Gordiychuk: So people being citizens, does that mean them participating in the decision making about water and for that matter, other environmental issues? So people being part of those important meetings where all these decisions are made, are people electing their representatives to be part of those meetings? Perhaps there's some common elements that in those three history points or societies you mentioned that we could generalize from not necessarily examples themselves.

Giulio Boccaletti: I think that's right. I think there are things you can learn, but I think there about the nature of political institutions. So yes, citizens need to participate.

But we also have to recognise that the world of water doesn't live in the abstract. It's embedded in a set of issues around welfare and economic development and economic growth and social equity and so on. So the key here is to make environmental decision-making and decision-making about the resources of a nation and the resources of a community, part of the broader political agenda.

Now, how does that happen? Well, in countries where people have political agency as citizens, then it's a matter of incorporating the environment and water resources, in particular in the political processes and building institutions that allow the state or the governance of the landscape to recognise the problems with water specifically.

If you look back at the, say, early 20th century and the American progressive era as an example. Well, the Army Corps of Engineers was the technical agency in service of a set of political decisions that were taken by the federal and state governments. It was never perfect. Politics is never perfect, but it was a way of giving agency to people and balancing individual liberty and collective responsibility.

So now you come to today and you ask, well, how do we improve the governance of water? Well, we improve it not by creating special governance of water, but we improve it by embedding water in the sort of economic and social strategy of countries.

In those places where citizens have power and political agency, well, that's easier to do. In places where citizens do not have that political agency, well, it becomes far more complicated.

And so in my mind, it's very hard to separate issues of sustainable management, of resources from issues of political legitimacy.

Kateryna Gordiychuk: Do you think today or right now in this point of time water is on the top of mind of of governments and leaders? And has it changed? Has this manifestation of our global warming changed our minds about water in any way?

Giulio Boccaletti: We seem to be suffering from collective amnesia because water as an expression of the climate system, if you take water as essentially the agent of climate and therefore the principal expression of the climate system, the question of whether water is at the top of people's minds is equivalent to the question of whether climate is at the top of people's minds.

And of course, people talk a lot about climate. But in truth, if you ask yourself, do we put our money where our mouth is, you know, do we actually take the actions that reflect the kind of priority that we claim climate change has, then I'm afraid we don't.

So, yes, the climate is moving and we talk about it more, but are we taking the kind of dramatic steps and interventions that would reflect a real priority? Not yet. That is concerning. And that is why I think it's so important that climate change issues of water, the management of water isn't thought of as an environmental issue, but as a fundamental platform for economic prosperity and development, and as such has to be embedded in political discourse.

Again, managing water is fundamentally about what our home looks like, whether we're in Germany, in Italy, in Pakistan, in China, or in the Horn of Africa. That is a question of identity. It's a question fundamentally of politics. And so that's where we need to work. We have to insert the question of identity and landscape in the politics of our nations.

Kateryna Gordiychuk: Giulio, I wanted to ask you a little bit about Chloris Geospatial as well. I know this is one of the solutions that you're pioneering. Can you tell me a little bit about it? What is so innovative about Chloris Geospatial?

Giulio Boccaletti: We're going through an incredible golden age of Earth monitoring. It's truly astonishing. I'm a climate scientist by training. I started working on Earth systems in the nineties. And the number of satellites, of eyes in the sky, of our ability to measure and monitor the state of the planet, has grown exponentially over the last 20 years. This is really an extraordinary time. And provided we work on political institutions that can read that data and understand that data and then translate it into effective policies, then we could be on the cusp of integrating once again the landscape and water and biomass and forests and all of that into our political decision making.

In that, our company, Chloris Geospatial, plays, I think, an important role because we use really cutting edge technology, fusing spaceborne LiDAR instruments with other satellite measurements to produce direct measures of biomass of how much does the biomass, how much trees, weigh. And we do that from space. And this is critical to manage an important piece of the climate agenda, which is the carbon sequestration that goes going to nature based solutions.

So what Chloris Geospatial does is it uses the most advanced satellites available to convert pictures from space into actual direct measurements of the growth and degradation of trees. And we think that this can truly transform the accuracy with which we can measure the functional role that forests and landscapes have in sequestering carbon.

Kateryna Gordiychuk: That's so interesting. Who benefits from the data once you translate from satellite imagery into actual data?

Giulio Boccaletti: You know, once you have measurements. And what we aspiring to do is industrializing the measurement of biomass in a way that supports the economy that's based on nature based solutions and on the ecosystem function that forests offer. Once we do that, then we are keen to make sure that the entire value chain can benefit from this.

So our customers go from the developers of carbon projects to the asset managers that own carbon projects to those who buy carbon offsets. You know, there's a lot of debate about carbon offsets as to whether they work or not, but there's a fact of the matter about how much carbon is drawn out from the atmosphere. And if we can actually monitor consistently the performance of these assets, we can then support those projects that work and point out the ones that don't.

So we can essentially help the whole economy actually rely on land use and land use change to sequester carbon. And that's the starting point for doing what a lot of us have been talking about for the last 20 years, which is fundamentally put nature on the balance sheet, not to just profit from nature, but to ensure that nature is properly valued by human society, something that today doesn't happen.

The first step is carbon. But of course we rely on nature for a number of ecosystem services. Even in my speciality of water, we rely on forests to manage water flows, for example. Forests slow down water, absorb the water in the soil so that it's released more slowly and so forth.

So Chloris Geospatial is at the frontier of trying to underpin all of those functions with data, can help us manage this at scale. And we do this on the whole planet. We measure the whole thing every year continuously. And so we think that this is the right answer for a globalized economy that wants to integrate sustainable nature into its future.

Kateryna Gordiychuk: I wanted to also ask you about your collaboration with UpLink. What have you gained? What has been useful for you in your work with geospatial and otherwise from your engagement with UpLink?

Giulio Boccaletti: I spent two decades working in large established organizations and in the corporate world. And then, I and my co-founder colleagues started this company and we really understood what it means to try and fly a plane while you're building it. And ventures of this kind, start-ups of this kind are, you know, lots of plates spinning at the same time and trying to keep them up while you go along.

And so there's nothing more valuable than a community within which you can see others do the same, and a particular community that has a similar purpose. And so one of the things that UpLink has done, which is really important to us, is it has accelerated our ability to network within the ecosystem of companies that are trying to achieve the digitisation of the planet for the purposes of sustainability.

That's an important mission. But when you're trying to build a company and enter a market and satisfy investors as well. So I'm sometimes it’s easy to lose track of the ecosystem that's around you. And so UpLink in that way is an extraordinary accelerator of ecosystem functionality.

The second thing that's happened through UpLink, of course, is that it’s given us a window through which to reach the rest of the world. Again, when you're flying a plane while you're building it, you can't really look down that much and try to see who's around you. And so UpLink has been a powerful window through which Chloris Geospatial and many of the other companies that we have seen and we collaborate with, have been able to reach out to the wider corporate community and to the wider economy. And that's incredibly powerful.

Kateryna Gordiychuk: How do you think, can innovation and entrepreneurship, in the same way as you described a Chloris Geospatial, can play a role in solving or at least approaching to solve the water crisis?

Giulio Boccaletti: One of the challenges in managing water is that, in truth, water is historically a low-tech business. Yes, in the supervision of water services, you have things like desalination, reuse of water. But if you think about the management of water, this giant, which is the agent of the climate system on the planet, this thing that's so powerful that it can overwhelm the human economy, if you think that a medium sized hurricane in the Atlantic will use as much energy as a thermal engine as the entire human economy uses in a year. Water as an expression of the climate system in this incredibly large and powerful thing. And our tools to manage it historically have been fairly low tech. We build canals, we build levees, we try and build dams. We manage the landscape differently in order to try and use ecosystems to interface our life with that of water.

But all of this is done, for the most part, blindfolded, because we don't actually know what's happening at the scale at which water operates, which is the scale of the planet and the scale of meteorological systems, the scale of the storms.

Well, the renaissance and the golden age in remote sensing that we are enjoying right now, may change that completely and may turn what is a fairly low-tech infrastructure-heavy sector into a vibrant, operationally sophisticated sector that uses data about the state of the planet to improve on the management of the water systems that support the economy and life more generally.

So in a way, these two worlds that may seem distant - on the one side, slow moving world and infrastructure that transforms the landscape and, on the other, the fast moving world of satellites and machine learning and remote sensing that we inhabit at Chloris Geospatial, actually, these two worlds will come together as the economy, companies and governments start using the landscape as an integral part of their economy and the fundamental infrastructure for security of their societies.

Kateryna Gordiychuk: My last question to you would be what is your hope when it has to do with water? I know that we're very far away from actually tackling the crisis full on. And as you said, it is a political issue. We need to tackle it immediately. But what gives you hope when you think about the water solutions and where can we go from here?

Giulio Boccaletti: You know, water came to Earth about three and a half billion years ago. It probably was carried on to the planet by asteroids. And ever since then, the quantity of water on this planet has remained fixed. Any time you drink a glass of water, you're drinking water that probably went through the kidneys of some dinosaur.

So the problem with water is not one of absolute quantities. It is its distribution over time and how we experience it. So the droughts, that are natural phenomena, turn into scarcity because of us, because of the choices we make, because of how much water we decide to use for our economy or because of how much we want to build in harm's way.

And so in a way, it is a hopeful story because any problem we face is the result of choices we have made. And therefore any solution that we might bring can also be the result of choices that we make. We have agency, certainly collectively, to solve the problems with water that we face. The question is whether we are willing and able to construct the institutions that can mobilise us and get us to agree on what those solutions are.

So in a way, the solution is in our hands, right? And so that's cause for optimism. There's no problem here that we can't solve. We just need to apply ourselves and choose to solve them.

Robin Pomeroy: Giulio Boccaletti was speaking to Kateryna Gordiychuk.

There’s lots of coverage related to the UN Water Conference on our website, including a new episode of the Meet the Leader podcast featuring Patrick Decker, CEO of US-based water technology company Xylem.

Find that wherever you get your podcasts or on our website wef.ch/podcasts, where you can find all previous episodes of Radio Davos - including my interview with Matt Damon, actor and, water activist.

This episode of Radio Davos was presented by me, Robin Pomeroy. Editing was by Jere Johansson. Studio production was by Gareth Nolan.

We will be very soon, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.