Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

By Duncan Wood

Across North America, access to clean, reliable water remains strikingly unequal. While Canada holds 20% of the world’s freshwater resources, many communities in the United States and Mexico struggle with scarcity, contamination, and inadequate infrastructure. From drought-plagued Sonora and Nuevo León to depleted aquifers in Arizona and California, the continent’s water crisis is both urgent and uneven. Even in Canada, water scarcity is an increasing concern due to rising demand from human activity, climate change, and regional droughts. Indigenous communities are particularly affected, facing long-standing challenges in accessing safe drinking water due to inadequate infrastructure and chronic underinvestment.

These disparities are now colliding with powerful economic and demographic forces—climate change, urban growth, industrial expansion, and the rapid rise of water-intensive sectors like energy, data centers, and semiconductors. The result is growing stress on shared water systems, rising social tensions, and an increasingly visible threat to North America’s competitiveness and environmental security.

While bulk water exports from Canada to drought-stricken areas is unlikely due to environmental risks, potential depletion of domestic water systems, the creation of risky dependencies, and most importantly domestic politics, there is another way forward. The time has come to launch a North American Water Dialogue: a sustained, inclusive, and forward-looking platform for regional cooperation on water access, resilience, and innovation. This dialogue would bring together national, state/provincial, and local governments; Indigenous leaders; industry; civil society; and scientific communities across the continent to examine shared challenges, explore best practices, and chart a course for equitable and sustainable water governance.

Why a Dialogue and not a Strategy?

It is far too early to talk of building a regional water strategy. Water issues are deeply local, often politically sensitive, and embedded in distinct legal and institutional traditions. Efforts to coordinate water governance across borders must begin with trust, transparency, and mutual learning. A dialogue would allow for constructive engagement without imposing rigid frameworks. It would offer a space for:

  • Mapping disparities in water access, quality, and infrastructure investment across the continent.
  • Identifying shared pressures, such as aquifer depletion, extreme weather, urban demand surges, and rising industrial use.
  • Sharing policy innovations, such as tiered pricing systems, water reuse mandates, and rights-based access frameworks.
  • Aligning research and data collection, especially on groundwater systems and transboundary watersheds.
  • The intersection of water with food and energy and the challenge of balancing priorities in all three areas.

Toward a Continental Conversation

This is not a call for top-down harmonization or sweeping regulatory integration. Rather, it is a call for open, sustained, and inclusive conversation—one that reflects the region’s diversity and builds pathways to collaboration from the ground up. While the dialogue’s outcomes would not focus on binding agreements, they might include research projects, pilot programs, voluntary commitments, or policy guidance—potential building blocks for future alignment.

Four Pillars for Regional Cooperation

To ground the dialogue in actionable outcomes, stakeholders should focus on four interlocking themes:

1. Technology for Equity and Resilience

From AI-driven leak detection systems to decentralized purification and recycling technologies, advanced water solutions are already transforming how water is managed. However, access to these tools remains uneven. The dialogue should explore:

  • How to accelerate the deployment of proven technologies in underserved communities.
  • Opportunities for regional R&D and innovation hubs focused on water-tech for drylands, megacities, and agricultural systems.
  • Knowledge exchange on water-smart industrial practices.

2. Investment for Inclusive Infrastructure

Significant investment gaps persist across North America—especially in rural, Indigenous, and marginalized urban areas. The dialogue could examine:

  • Innovative financing mechanisms, including public-private partnerships and green bonds.
  • The role of multilateral institutions in scaling water infrastructure.
  • How climate finance and ESG frameworks can support equitable water investment.

3. Pricing and Incentives for Sustainable Use

Water is still undervalued in many parts of the continent. Better pricing can support conservation and fund infrastructure—but only if paired with protections for vulnerable populations. Key topics for discussion include:

  • Tiered and seasonal pricing models.
  • Water trading markets and industrial pricing signals.
  • Social safeguards to ensure affordability and universal access.

4. Policy Convergence and Transboundary Cooperation

North America shares multiple cross-border water systems—from the Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers to the Great Lakes Basin. The dialogue should promote:

  • Improved mechanisms for transboundary water governance and data sharing.
  • Lessons from successful watershed agreements and binational commissions.
  • Frameworks for managing cross border industrial and agricultural externalities.

Conclusion: Dialogue is the beginning

North America cannot afford to wait until its water crises spiral into broader economic, environmental, and political disruptions. Nor can it impose one-size-fits-all solutions. What the continent needs now is a platform for shared understanding, innovation, and trust. Water may divide watersheds and jurisdictions, but it can also bring people and communities together through shared responsibility and vision.

Lead image: Photo © J. Carl Ganter

Published June 10, 2025

Duncan Wood publishes extensively on supply chain policy, critical minerals, Mexican politics and the broader US-Mexico relationship. He was vice president for strategy and new initiatives at the Wilson Center and directed the Center’s Mexico Institute from 2013 to 2020.

Circle of Blue provides relevant, reliable, and actionable on-the-ground information about the world’s resource crises.