Water Tech

A Guide to Investment, Innovation and Business Opportunities in the Water Sector

William Sarni, Tamin Pechet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781849714730
• eBook ISBN: 9781136461668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Energy Industry
• Index: Business

This book unveils how the world in the twenty-first century will need to manage our most fundamental resource need, water. It outlines how stakeholders can improve water use in their homes, their businesses, and the world.

In particular, it focuses on the role of stakeholders in crafting a twenty-first century paradigm for water. Investors not only drive innovation through direct investment in new technologies but also by highlighting risk and driving reporting and disclosure within the business community.

Water Tech highlights the business drivers to address water related issues. These include business disruption, regulatory risk and reputational risk along with opportunities in the commercialization of innovative technologies such as desalination and water reuse and treatment. The authors argue that through increased attention on water scarcity through activities such as reporting and disclosure we are now accelerating innovation in the water industry. They show how we are just now capturing the true cost and value of water and this is creating opportunities for investors in the water sector. The text takes the reader through key aspects of emerging innovative technologies along with case studies and key issues on the path to commercialization. A roadmap of the opportunities in the water sector is presented based on interviews with leading authorities in the water field including innovators, investors, legal, regulatory experts and businesses.

Part I

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Innovation

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Anyone who can solve the problems of water will be worthy of two Nobel prizes – one for peace and one for science.

(John F. Kennedy)

There is an air of frustration in some of my (Sarni's) conversations in Marseille, France, at the 2012 World Water Forum. Figuring out how we accelerate collaboration on water conservation projects within the watersheds in which we operate is part of these conversations. Not a heated debate; instead a genuine desire to deploy resources quickly to collaborate on a wide range of water projects – water efficiency, water conservation, infrastructure, and capacity building, to name a few. The consensus: collectively, we need to move fast.

These are not global water non-governmental organizations (NGOs) discussing watershed conservation projects. Instead these are leaders from multinational companies representing their CEOs in addressing the global and local challenges of water scarcity and water quality. Not just a concern about how water related issues could impact their businesses, but how these issues impact a wide range of stakeholders – civil society, consumers, customers, employees, and other businesses.

Why would CEOs care about collaboration on water projects to address these issues? CEOs (and, as a result, their chief sustainability officers) care about water more than you might think.

The answer comes from Peter Schulte and Jason Morrison from the Pacific Institute:¹

They care because water scarcity means that there may not be enough water to produce their goods. Water pollution can lead to great costs to treat water to a level suitable for production or possibly strict regulations. A lack of access to clean water and sanitation for communities may mean that company water allocations are curbed in favor of these more pressing needs or that the company is perceived as being complicit in this lack of access. Ineffective public water management may mean that water is not delivered to a company consistently or reliably. Water is a shared resource and we need to find ways to share it equitably or we all suffer.

One of the many stakeholder meetings was a two-day meeting of the CEO Water Mandate.² Launched in 2007 by the UN Secretary-General, the CEO Water Mandate is an initiative of the UN Global Compact³ – operated in collaboration with the Pacific Institute⁴ – designed to assist companies in the development, implementation, and disclosure of water sustainability policies and practices. The Mandate produces research that identifies and provides guidance on water-related business challenges and convenes multi-stakeholder working conferences whereby companies and their stakeholders discuss what it means for a company to be a responsible water steward. As of 2012, the Mandate is endorsed by more than 80 companies from a wide range of industry sectors and geographies.

Typically, corporate water management improvements, if present at all, have focused on water use efficiency and reducing water pollution caused by the company. The Mandate and its endorsers are committed not only to these crucial internal improvements, but also to developing and implementing new pathways with which companies can encourage and contribute to the sustainable water management of their supply chains and the watersheds in which they operate.

This expanded view of corporate water stewardship focuses largely on new ideas about how companies can relate to and partners with others to support sustainable water management, namely the concepts of policy engagement and collective action. These emerging strategies are based on two fundamental realities that shape water-related business risks:

• Often the greatest water-related business risks stem from conditions outside of the company fence line, such as water scarcity, poor ambient water quality, insufficient water resources management, inadequate infrastructure, climate change, and others, over which companies have limited influence.

• The same water-related conditions that create risk for business also create risk for communities, the environment, and governments alike. This shared risk creates an incentive for shared, collective response.

Business engagement with water policy, if implemented effectively and responsibly, allows companies to mitigate water-related business risks by encouraging more sustainable water management (especially by means of supporting and enriching government's management capacity) outside their fence lines. Collective action enables companies to partner with others in order to combine resources (e.g. funding, expertise, local knowledge, and innovative practices) to promote shared water-related goals. Taken together, these strategies enable companies to think more comprehensively about the root causes of and most effective solutions for society's critical water challenges.

The CEO Water Mandate meeting in Marseille, France started off with an overview of two key projects, one of which we will now highlight – an update on the development of a Water Action Hub. The “Hub” is an online tool designed to facilitate collaboration between stakeholders interested in addressing a wide range of water issues that are important not only to CEO Water Mandate members, but to a wide range of stakeholders – the public sector, civil society, NGOs, consumers, customers, and supply chain partners for these companies.

The Hub will fill an important gap in how stakeholders are attempting to connect to each other to work on water efficiency, water conservation, and public policy projects, to name a few. The Hub will allow stakeholders to go online and enter information necessary to facilitate a connection – topics of interest, geographic areas of interest, along with key profile information. The conversation in Marseille addressed the “nuts and bolts” of how to build the platform and how to facilitate constructive engagement with interested stakeholders. Much progress was made, building on the enthusiasm and commitment of the project sponsors, technical advisors, advisory committee and other interested parties.

Why bring up the CEO Water Mandate and the Hub? The CEO Water Mandate and projects like the Hub are designed to tackle the complex challenges of managing the ever increasing demands on water supplies – access to clean water, sanitation, water for agriculture and industrial uses, and ecosystem needs. Failure to address access to clean water and sanitation results in disease and deaths, negative impacts to economic growth and failure to meet the needs of agriculture and energy.

The Hub represents innovation in new partnerships, collaboration platforms and processes (Water Futures Partnership⁵ is an example of such partnerships) along with changes in public policy, water governance and reporting/disclosure initiatives (such as the CDP Water Program).

It is clear that innovation is not just about technology.

Innovation in technology, public policy (including pricing) and partnerships will be needed to solve the ever-increasing challenges of water scarcity and water quality. Innovation in the water industry is coming from all angles and a wide range of stakeholders.

If you picked up this book you likely care about how innovation can address the challenges in providing access to clean water and sanitation together with sustainable water for industry and agriculture. Unfortunately, the statistics and projections for water are currently troubling:

• “It is estimated that two out of every three people will live in water-stressed areas by the year 2025. In Africa alone, it is estimated that 25 countries will be experiencing water stress (below 1,700m³ per capita per year) by 2025. Today, 450 million people in 29 countries suffer from water shortages.”⁶

• “Clean water supplies and sanitation remain major problems in many parts of the world, with 20 percent of the global population lacking access to safe drinking water. Around 1.1 billion people globally do not have access to improved water supply sources, while 2.4 billion people do not have access to any type of improved sanitation facility.”⁷

• “About 2 million people die every year due to water-borne diseases from fecal pollution of surface waters; most of them are children less than five years of age. A wide variety of human activities also affect the coastal and marine environment. Population pressures, increasing demand for space and resources, and poor economic performance can all undermine the sustainable use of our oceans and coastal areas.”⁸

• More than 3.4 million people globally die each year from water-related disease, of which 1.5 million are children under the age of 5.⁹

• Major regions of the world are facing severe drought conditions (when this book was being written about 68 percent of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Author biographies
• Part I Innovation
• Part I What is water tech?
• Part III Building the twenty-first-century water industry — ideas, money, and commercialization
• Index