Water is the tip of the spear for many of the world’s greatest challenges. Yet the water sector faces a “disorganizational emergency” where recent existential events are overtaking the ability to respond.
Spain is on track to become the first desert country in Europe. Mexico City could reach “Day Zero,” when it runs out of water. Fires in California, floods in Pakistan, conflicts in Africa over water.
Summer 2024 was the hottest in history. More droughts, floods, and crop failures. Social, political, economic, and supply chain instability. The risks are multiplying.
We thought we had more time.
Hosted live from the broadcast studios at the Medill School at Northwestern University, Designing Water’s Future brought together more than 150 leaders of major brands, polling firms, global institutions and experts in building systems change movements. It was hosted by Circle of Blue, the journalism, research and convening center focused on water, food and energy globally, and Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research and the Medill School.
“Together, we are creating a new operating system for the world’s fresh water,” said J. Carl Ganter, managing director of Circle of Blue and host of the program. “Our piece of the story is to urgently bring together the best in data, design, communications, and convening to arrive at solutions.”
“Our mission is to build a shared compass and map that informs and aligns action across finance, policy, media, innovation, and the public,” Ganter said.
The February 12, 2025 event was co-hosted by Professor Sera Young, Morton O. Schapiro Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University and director of the Water Insecurity Experiences (WISE) Scales, which measure how communities, families and individuals worldwide are affected by a lack of safe water.
“For too long, we’ve assumed that the presence of infrastructure is sufficient for water security,” Young said. “Our goal is to make a more water secure world for everyone, no matter who they are.”
“We’re at a moment now where we’re starting to realize that there is no existential threat that exists outside of the realm of humans,” said psychologist Renée Lertzman, who studies how humans react to existential threats like water crises and climate change.
“What are the conditions that enable humans to really face and look into what might be overwhelming threatening, confusing? This is really our challenge,” she said. “It’s not only about the technical solutions. This work is also emotionally charged. People want to feel included, contributing, that they have agency.”
The crises are accelerating and universally affect every supply chain, every business, every community.
“The link between the hydrological cycle, biodiversity and climate change is key,” said Henk Ovink, executive director of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water. “With every degree of climate change, we have 7 percent more water vapor in the sky. This is supercharging our freak weather events.”
A lack of shared mission, urgency and alignment are dire threats, he said. “On the global stage, water still does not have an agreement, a compact, or something to rally around.”
While the water cycle is dangerously “broken,” Ovink said, “there is a real opportunity. Stabilizing the hydrological cycle makes it possible to leapfrog into achieving our goals and missions.”
While water has defied becoming a priority political and investment issue, at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting held in Davos, Switzerland in January, water was high on the agenda. The Forum will be launching a systems-focused water initiative in March. This will focus on the intersections of water, food, energy, and health in the changing climate.
The sense of urgency is rising. With “drier dries and hotter hots,” in the American West, California will lose 10 percent of its available water supply by 2040.
“When it comes to places like the Colorado River… you’re going to have to have a mindset shift,” said Jason Morrison, president of the Pacific Institute, a water policy and solutions think tank based in California. “The notion of ‘we’re all in this together’… is not really the mindset that you have in that part of the world. The boxing gloves come off when it gets dry.”
Morrison said many companies and governments have their head in the sand, and are misguided when they think they can weather water crises alone.
“They have this false understanding of ‘castle resilience,’” Morrison said. This idea that somehow individual entities are going to be able to get a more resilient water future by themselves by being the castle in the hill or having the moat that protects them from the floods. It’s a false concept.”
To design a new path for water requires data from all sources – and listening better to what people believe in the face of changing realities.
A new report from Globescan, the polling firm, and WWF shows that water is often ignored. “We need to look at water in a much different way,” said Jason Walters, director at Globescan. People see water as “just an input when it’s really a more complex system.” Water should be the “connector and solutions space for more integrated approaches.”
As companies are “mostly focused on their own operations,” there’s “a need and opportunity for the private sector to step up on advocacy, engagement, collaboration,” Walters said. Stakeholders are really asking for companies to be much more open and transparent.”
Of those polled, 72 percent say they want companies and the government to take actions to protect water. And, finally, the water sector is failing in how it tells its stories.
“Communications and engagement really need a reboot,” Walters said.
What’s holding us back when have the solutions?
“The technologies we need to address the water crisis exist today,” said Virginia Newton-Lewis, director of water and sustainability at Grundfos, a Denmark-based water technology company.
“The tech is here, but technology alone can’t solve the water crisis unless we also look at the other barriers — finance, business models, capability and capacity, and the policy enabling environment.”
There are hopeful signs, Newton-Lewis said. “I think we will see more progress than backsliding on water in Europe in 2025. But everything is quite precarious. How can we, as a community, really come together and try to prevent some of the backsliding (on regulations and incentives)?”
“What should we be saying, and to whom? What kind of framing should we be using? What kind of opportunities should we be seizing in this changing political landscape?” she said.
Photo: Vanessa Bly / Northwestern University
Surviving a real “Day Zero” scenario
As hundreds of cities worldwide face severe water stress, there’s no more chilling term than “Day Zero,” the inflection point when your city could run out of water. Mike Webster, director of the 2030 Water Resources Group at the World Bank was manager of the Cape Town water utility when the unthinkable happened. In 2018 reservoirs were drying up and people were waiting in line for water.
“This was a one-in-500-year event of declining rainfall,” Webster said. “It was a cruel vulnerability.” Webster explained how water use management, leak reduction, and a communications campaign enabled city residents to survive.
Now at the World Bank and through a global lens, Webster is watching the increasing gap between supply and demand. The gap is expected to rise to 57 percent over the next 5 years, due heavily to increased urbanization and water for agriculture.
At the World Bank, they have mobilized some $6 billion of private capital. But that’s not enough. “By 2050, about 300 cities over a million will face significant water stress. So what we experienced is coming to a city near you.”
History as a guide: Take stink to power
Water has defined whether civilizations thrive or fail. Ancient empires were born on river deltas while others evaporated into history when their water supplies disappeared. For water, history is also guide for what works and, as University of Exeter professor and historian Tim Lenton calls, “positive tipping points” when small or big levers have triggered waves of change.
Lenton, founding director of the Global Systems Institute, described how in 1858 the Thames River in London was clogged by effluent from a medieval sewage system and baked into an intolerable stench.
“That particular moment was enough to trigger a shift in action and governance to implement something the civil engineers had been pushing for.”
“We all have some agency to create the enabling conditions to tip the system,” Lenton said. Protestors in London literally “took stink to power” and demanded change.
Building systems initiatives
What are the barriers to systems change, and especially systems change for something as fundamental to life and ecosystems as water?
“We need to escape an old paradigm of problem solving,” said Jordan Fabyanske, program director for Dalberg Catalyst, which builds large-scale systems initiatives worldwide. “We can’t treat water as another silo. The kinds of actions we need most right now are the ones we chronically neglect.”
Fabyanske said we need more integrated approaches for deep, transformative systems work to succeed. And we need persistence and a larger situational awareness.
Key points for systems change:
- A common understanding of our situation, the systemic drivers that created the situation, and the systemic drivers that can move us.
- An orchestrator or facilitator who represents a field of partners who can leverage the totality of the coalition’s strengths.
- Collective, adaptive strategies that are continuously updated over time.
- A stable base of funding to hold coalitions together.
- Powerful narratives that showcase success and lessons and that drive a feedback loop of engagement, learning, and resource mobilization.
“Never waste a crisis. These are moments when we can harness the energy to shift our mindsets and think differently about the future,” Fabyanske said.
Telling the story
Making sense of existential challenges like climate and water crises is what Justin Worland does every day as senior correspondent at TIME Magazine. It’s a story of complexity. What’s the media missing? Is it finance, politics, environment, lives at stake, winners and losers?
It’s also about reaching readers where they are. “There’s an important role for what one might call strategic journalism,” Worland said. “For a lot of people, these things feel distant. People take stable water supplies for granted. So the challenge is how do you make them feel like something is urgent to them, not to distant communities, but actually in their homes and backyards.”
The Designing Water’s Future participants joined breakout sessions that included:
- What we need to know: Water crises globally and in the U.S.
- Enabling environments for policy and investment
- Psychology of existential threats and how to shift public opinion
- What is takes to create systems change at scale
- Technology and Innovation for democratizing knowledge about water insecurity
Essential. Volatile. Uncertainty. Security. Sacred. Health. Scarce. Power. Complicated. Magic. Life.
Those were just a few of the ways participants described water.
“I hope we’ve filled your glass,” Ganter said to close the event. “We’ve learned that most of the solutions already exist. But we need new mindsets – and we need to bring more people along. We started with a frank assessment. Our water cycle is broken. Dozens of cities face “Day Zero” scenarios. And our political systems are being tested whether they are up to the challenge. Will we backslide on decades of work or seize the moment for change? Our mission here is to think about water as not only an existential threat, but a universal solvent.”
“One thing is for certain,” Ganter said.
“Incremental is not an option.”