Intelligence Squared

Can Water Shape Our Future?

February 4, 2026

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  • The climate crisis is fundamentally a water crisis, requiring climate-resilient water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) systems built on holistic, community-led planning rather than siloed approaches. 
  • Building truly resilient water systems is complex, demanding integrated solutions that address infrastructure, dynamic service management, and the protection of healthy ecosystems that recharge water sources. 
  • Investing in clean water yields significant economic returns (a $1:$4.3 return cited) and is essential for achieving global health equality, economic growth, and climate justice, making it a non-negotiable foundation for a thriving future. 

Segments

Water’s Foundational Role
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(00:00:03)
  • Key Takeaway: Water is the foundation underpinning all life, systems, climate regulation, trade, and biodiversity, making its security vital for wellbeing.
  • Summary: Clean water is the starting point for health, education, and livelihoods, and WaterAid’s mission centers on clean water as the most powerful tool for building a sustainable future. Unsafe water, toilets, and hygiene cause preventable deaths, with diarrhea killing a child every two minutes. Despite its ubiquity, one in ten people currently lacks water close to home.
Climate Crisis as Water Crisis
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(00:03:38)
  • Key Takeaway: The climate crisis manifests directly as a water crisis through intensifying droughts, floods, and sea-level rise, disturbing the water cycle.
  • Summary: Climate change intensifies droughts, floods, and storms, severely impacting people’s lives by disturbing the water cycle. A past severe drought in East Africa demonstrated that utilities relying solely on surface water without climate resilience planning face catastrophic failure. Climate resilience must be integrated from the very beginning of any project design.
Sector Confusion in Water Management
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(00:05:29)
  • Key Takeaway: Responsibility for water system maintenance and sustainability often falls between government silos, necessitating a holistic approach that integrates all water user groups.
  • Summary: Water management frequently falls between the cracks because different government departments focus only on specific user groups like farmers, industry, or households. Long-term success requires bringing all actors together to create a holistic system that can collectively identify and implement solutions during changing climate events like droughts or floods.
Complexity of Water Security
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(00:07:23)
  • Key Takeaway: Achieving water security requires addressing multiple interconnected factors, including infrastructure, maintenance, investment, ecosystem health, policy, and government accountability.
  • Summary: Solving water access issues is complex because it requires more than just fixing infrastructure; it demands ensuring maintenance, securing investment, protecting upstream ecosystems, and establishing accountable government policies. The gold standard for sustainability is a fully functioning system where users simply open the tap without needing to consider the underlying complexities.
Prioritizing Water Over ‘Shiny’ Tech
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(00:08:31)
  • Key Takeaway: Governments developing rapidly may prioritize new, innovative technologies over fundamental clean water access, requiring advocates to link water security directly to political and economic objectives.
  • Summary: There is a universal tendency to flock toward new, shiny technologies rather than focusing on foundational needs like water. WaterAid works to educate decision-makers by demonstrating that water underpins the success of desired sectors like trade, technology hubs, and a healthy workforce. Aligning water objectives with existing political goals is crucial for securing necessary change.
Locally-Led Adaptation in Practice
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(00:10:35)
  • Key Takeaway: Effective climate resilience in WASH is driven by local knowledge and leadership, exemplified by community-led financing mechanisms that foster ownership.
  • Summary: In Ghana, WaterAid implemented a climate-resilient WASH financing mechanism that is community-led, putting local populations in the driver’s seat to design interventions. This approach builds ownership, as communities identify their biggest problems rather than having solutions dictated to them. Overcoming challenges required shifting communication methods to accessible formats like videos and voice notes to facilitate co-creative problem-solving.
Policy Gaps and Climate Justice
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(00:14:41)
  • Key Takeaway: Climate policy must integrate water centrally, break down policy silos, actively incorporate the voices of the most impacted, and close the significant finance gap without exacerbating debt.
  • Summary: Water is often overlooked in policymaking because it is relevant to everyone, leading to work in disconnected silos. Policymakers must recognize this gap and ensure community leadership shapes necessary actions, countering the frustrating narrative that solutions are unknown. Closing the finance gap requires increasing financial mechanisms that support water projects without burdening already disadvantaged populations.
Injustice in Climate Initiatives
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(00:17:22)
  • Key Takeaway: Climate-focused initiatives often lack climate justice when they prioritize large-scale benefits (like dams for cities) while neglecting or harming smaller, less politically powerful downstream or marginalized communities.
  • Summary: Well-meaning water projects can cause injustice by prioritizing one group, such as building dams for upstream cities while ignoring downstream communities dependent on that water flow. These injustices disproportionately affect those who lack the cultural capital or access to advocate for their needs. WaterAid specifically works with rural communities to ensure they are not left behind in development efforts.
Rethinking Water Systems for Longevity
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(00:19:09)
  • Key Takeaway: Future water systems must incorporate three adaptation goals: robust infrastructure, dynamic service management capable of reacting to hazards, and protection of healthy ecosystems.
  • Summary: Water systems require more than just infrastructure installation; they need to function robustly even during extreme heat, floods, or droughts. Dynamic service management means having actionable plans to adapt, such as a health center knowing exactly where to source water if its borehole runs dry. Protecting catchment areas and ecosystems is vital because they recharge groundwater and surface water, ensuring the long-term supply.
Working With Nature for Water Supply
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(00:22:47)
  • Key Takeaway: Working with nature through nature-based solutions protects long-term water supply and biodiversity simultaneously, proving that preservation and extraction are not mutually exclusive goals.
  • Summary: Preserving ecosystems is directly linked to securing long-term water supply, as healthy nature ensures rain patterns continue and water sources are recharged. Nature-positive solutions involve building in a way that benefits nature or minimizes impact, recognizing that ecosystems have inherent functions beyond serving human needs. Adaptation to climate change must happen in harmony with nature to ensure persistence.
Optimistic Future with Prioritized Water
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(00:24:54)
  • Key Takeaway: If clean water were universally prioritized, the future would see thriving, healthier communities with flourishing economies, as 80% of jobs in low-income countries rely on clean water.
  • Summary: A world prioritizing water means healthier communities free from deadly, preventable diseases like cholera, allowing children to stay in school. Economically, this prioritization is critical, as two-thirds of global jobs, and 80% in low-income countries, depend on a secure clean water supply. Despite frustrations over slow progress, optimism is warranted because over 2.4 billion people have gained access to clean water since 2000, proving change is achievable.