Several European cities (especially in France, Spain and the US) are reclaiming control of their water from private companies, while investors are taking care to invest with firms that take the environment seriously. Will water be the next cause?īut there’s a silver lining. Data shows that rising food prices in 2010 drove some 44 million people into extreme poverty. There is still a lot that could be done.Īs water gets scarcer and increasingly privatized, the cost of drinking and consuming water has increased, and related industries – like agriculture and food – have increased their prices too. Yet these so-called ‘nature-based solutions’ account for less than 1% of today’s water infrastructure investments, and total water investment is only a third of the $1.7 trillion needed to provide safe drinking water for all by 2030. In New York’s watershed protection programme, city-dwellers cut the costs of flood-protection by paying farmers to conserve forests and wetlands. Their reserves are drying up from a combination of climate change and agriculture, putting it at risk of a “Day Zero” water shortage, similar to the risk faced by South Africa.įinance providers could look for innovative ways to invest in water, such as reviving sources, developing natural underground water storage (aquifers), or using wetlands to deal with industrial waste. This exacerbates Morocco’s water problems. For example, the world’s 5th largest producer of strawberries, Morocco, sells 95% of its production to Europe, effectively exporting water through its agriculture. A serious water shortage could add billions to a country’s borrowing costs an actual water crisis could cost much much more. Extreme droughts could increase losses in some investment portfolios 10-fold, reducing agricultural productivity for years afterwards. study tried to put a price on the damage caused by water abstraction by the world’s largest (mining, energy, industrial, etc.) companies and they reckon it’s equivalent to $366 billion per year! Private investors are reluctant to cough up the money for this environmental depletion, but this will have a financial cost eventually. W ater privatizations have become common, despite fears that private ownership can mean higher water prices. Disturbingly, one of the immediate measures that European financial institutions asked Greece to take when the country was adopting austerity policies was to sell off €50 bn worth of public “assets ”, the first of which was privatizing water.
#Aqua finance free
Today, the world looks at water not as a free property and the right of every individual, but as a money-driven commodity like the stuff we dig out of the ground. As it stands, a litre of Fiji water anywhere in the world costs more than a litre of petrol and a litre of milk combined. In Pakistan, the market for bottled drinking water has grown three-fold, and will reportedly grow four-fold by 2021. In the U.S., municipal water prices in 30 cities increased by 18% since 2010 and by 7% in 2017-18 alone. In Belgium, water prices rise by 4% nearly every year. Water is an increasingly attractive “asset” for businesses to invest in, with water privatization leading to tariff wars. has warned that water scarcity can lead to civil unrest, mass migration, even wars.Īs the supply of water decreases and demand increases, the price skyrockets. This shapes not just our environment and economy but geopolitics as well. In fact, fresh water is quickly overtaking crude oil as the scarcest critical resource.
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