 Welcome everyone in the room and online to the new economics of water press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Safe, clean, reliable water resources plays a critical role to safeguard the health and well-being of people, support the growth of industries, economies, and ensuring a plentiful agricultural food production and preserving our natural environment. Today, I'm joined by my esteemed panelist, Senior Minister Tharmin of the Government of Singapore, Marian Mazucato, Professor at the University of College London, Johan Rockstrom, Director at Potsdam University for Climate Impact Research. Thank you all for joining me today. The Global Commission on the Economics of Water was launched today. Senior Minister, you will be sharing a little bit on that announcement, but before we get to that, I would like to turn to Professor Rockstrom. During the week in Davos, we are addressing all of the complex and interconnected issues, including climate energy, food, land use, health, and water. How does this fit in the wider set of systems? Yes, thanks, and great to have this opportunity, because it's really significant at this Davos meeting this year how the food crisis is really at the centre of our discussions. We're discussing challenges of the climate crisis. We're discussing nature, but we're missing that behind and the determinant whether we are going to have any chance of mitigating climate, water is behind it, any chance of handling the food crisis requires massive investments in fresh water. The health outcomes for humanity behind it is fresh water. Security to avoid conflicts is to a large extent amplified and put at risk because of fresh water. So this is the missing piece in large parts of our policy and our economic discussions. Just to give you a few examples of the evidence we have here that currently when India is forced to close its borders, to export of wheat, when we see the food crisis in Kenya, these are water scarcity and heat-related impacts which come through climate change and ecosystem change which then impacts on water scarcity which has immediate impacts on food security in these regions which then can trickle over even into crisis. We have today a situation where we are impacting on the global hydrological cycle at a planetary scale and it all manifests itself into abrupt changes at the regional scale. So today for the first time ever we need to consider fresh water as a common good for all of humanity because the way we manage land impacts on evaporation which in turn regulates the amount of rainfall which means that we currently are in a situation that we are ourselves changing the rainfall on planet earth. A few examples here is for example the South American monsoon which is to a very significant extent impacted by the level of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest because water evaporates and flows in atmospheric rivers downwind and generates rainfall, securing for example fresh water in Sao Paulo. We have the same situation in the South East Asian monsoon and the West African monsoon but also the implications on heat waves, droughts and significant impacts on water scarcity in temperate regions of the world. For example when the town of Lytton was hit by tremendous heat waves last summer in 2021 and then burned down two weeks later because of the water scarcity and dryness caused by that drought event. So overall we today are in a completely new situation with regards to threats of water to human well-being and development and now we need to put the economics of water not only in terms of monetary values but also in terms of governance in terms of recognizing water as a commons that we now need to manage as a broad systems approach. So that's why this commission is not only necessary but urgent to take this challenge on. Thank you. We've looked at kind of the macro. Senior Minister Tharman, can you tell us exactly why this global commission was necessary and the role it will play? Well I was about to say that but I was wondering whether it might be better we go on to Mariana first to talk about the economics here. Johan was talking about the science and why it has to be viewed as a global cycle, as a global common good, not just a local issue. Mariana is going to talk about the new economics required that goes together with that. Yes, in the title is very much economics for water not just a global commission on water. Can you explain why that was an intention and what was the intention behind that? Sure and the review that will be coming out which I'm sure Tharman will get to is going to be called the review on water as a common good and that word common good is actually a radical word because in economics we have notions of the public good and it sounds good because the second word is good but it's really framed more as a correction for something the private sector is not doing and what water as a common good requires is an objective of what we can actually do together and what's interesting is that when we have objectives especially during urgent periods, think of what, we just lived through a health pandemic with all these COVID-19 recovery plans, not in all countries, but also war where all of a sudden money literally comes out of the woodwork after we were told there was no money. Think of Germany overnight 100 billion and how it was calculated was that it would be seen as an investment, not a cost, so it didn't actually go into the deficit figures. This is all just kind of accounting and game playing with numbers. We don't do that for some reason with our wicked challenges or societal challenges. We tend to only do that mainly with military industrial complex kind of problems but also as we saw with the health pandemic when millions of people are dying. So one of the issues is if water is as urgent of a problem as some of the top climate scientists like Johann have been telling us, by the way, for many years, we're just starting to listen now, how do we turn it A into an urgent problem and the numbers are quite astounding. We might come back to some of the other numbers that you talked about this morning which are quite shocking, but also an intersectoral problem, we shouldn't see water as a sector but water as a common good means it has to be seen as cross-sectorly across many different kind of solutions across sectors as different as nutrition and construction, everything, but also in terms of coming back to the new economic thinking, it means seeing the role of government which is so important, it's not the only actor but it's a key actor as a market co-creator and a market shaper in the system. So the policies themselves need to be framed in terms of shaping and not market fixing because that's just gonna patch up the system and central to that, and I know that Tarmin will talk more about it, it really is this kind of getting rid of this public-private divide, this is gonna require huge amounts of collaboration, huge amounts of co-investment and finance and how to actually design that with a common good lens is one of the really innovative things that this group is gonna provide. And lastly, we shouldn't forget that even though urgent periods make us kind of create money and do things that we weren't doing before, sometimes that speed can also create problems, things can kind of pass by because someone just kind of presses on the speed of the speed pedal and that's where we have to be careful because issues of equity and justice are incredibly important. So one of the things that are gonna be very key is in terms of the voices that we're bringing to the commission but also not using fluffy language like we're all in this together, actually there's gonna be some real changes that will have to be made to business models, to way governments work, to the way they relate one to another and to the fact that so many voices haven't been at the table, even with climate to be honest, we haven't brought many different voices to the table. So issues to make sure that this is an inclusive approach, it's equitable and has justice at the center is also part of the common good framing. I turn to you, senior. Before you come in, Tom, I should I give you a little bit of a brief, just because I think it is essential actually because not only have we not focused on economics of water, when we have focused on water, we've only focused on drinking water, domestic water and that is roughly 150 liters per person per day which is what the wealthy are using and at the United Nations, the human rights on water has been set that number to 50 liters per person per day. But the challenge is that that is just a few percent of our daily needs of water because the big consumer of water is our food and for an adequate diet for an adult human being, the estimates today are that we need something in the order of 3,000 liters of water per person per day, three cubic meters, three tons of fresh water. That is the massive amounts of water that go through rainfall into soils and are used by the crops in order to produce all food, all energy, all biomass, all nature is the big, big role of water. So this is one of the big challenges that we're taking on, so it's not only the economics of water, it's the economics of all water. It's water for economic development, not only water for human health. It's all these challenges. Very good, so. Now we can allow us to. Yeah, absolutely. So this was an initiative in the first instance of the Dutch government. They are co-chairs together with the Tajikistan government of next year's UN Water Conference and just to illustrate how important that water conference is. It's not just another conference. It's the first UN water conference in 46 years, which given the gravity of the issue is very unfortunate. It just hasn't received the attention it deserves. For something that's really in the bloodstream of economic life and human life, it just hasn't received the attention it deserves. And the commission that was formed is not just another commission and the report we're coming out with is not just another good interesting report. It is really aimed at mobilizing action, mobilizing changes in government, mobilizing finance, and mobilizing the scale up of technologies and solutions that can enable everyone in every corner of the world to have access to clean water, clean drinking water, safe sanitation, and it's only gonna be possible if we take action, not just where local problems arise, but if we take action globally. Mariana Mazukato, Johan Rockstrom, Ngozi Okonju-Uweela, and myself, Farman Shambhugratnam, are the co-chairs of this commission. It's closing the trilogy that started with the Nick Stern Report on Climate Change and the Partha Das Gupta Report on Biodiversity. Water is part of that trilogy. It's part of the trilogy for reasons of science, as Johan was explaining, because we're not gonna solve the climate crisis if we don't solve water. We're not gonna solve the food crisis or the energy security crisis if we don't solve water. So we have to look at the global commons, not in siloed terms, as Mariana was saying, but as a complex set of interacting challenges. They're all one big challenge, but we've got to address them in parallel. And water has been the most neglected of these issues. So we're gonna take a fundamental relook. The commission is going to be advancing the new science, the new economics, the new governance structures required, the new financing approaches required, and the new ways in which technologies can be spread everywhere in the world affordably so that everyone has access to clean water and so that the planet can sustain itself. And the basic insight that Johan and Mariana were talking about, that when problems arise in the Sahel or even in Texas or anywhere else, it's not because something went wrong in that local area, it's because something is going wrong globally. Something went wrong globally. So we've got to address this at the global level. And it means fundamentally a few shifts in the way we think about this in international governance and national governance. Internationally, we should stop regarding this as a matter of delivering aid, whether it's aid to Sub-Saharan Africa or to countries in South Asia or Latin America. This is about investing in global common, the global commons for the common good of all, including the rich countries. Because what we do in Sub-Saharan Africa or anywhere else is for the good of all countries and all societies. So it's about not aid, but co-investment. We've got to pull together our resources, invest effectively to solve this problem. So that's the first shift in thinking. The second shift of thinking is we've got to find ways in which water, although it's a right of everyone to have access to water and it's one of the essentials of life, is not something that we say the private sector can't get involved in or that markets can't be used to work. We've got to find ways in which we mobilize private resources within regulated markets to address the public good, to address the common good. And we've got to find ways in which the public sector operates on a disciplined basis and on a financially sustainable basis. It means valuing water, but it means thinking not about public and private as two separate worlds, two separate economic or financial worlds, but working together. And that's fundamental because we're not going to be able to raise the finance required without this deep public-private collaboration. And at the end of the day, it is, as Mariana says, about equity. But it's not just equity in the traditional sense. We should all be very deeply worried when a significant part of humanity doesn't have access to clean water and their lives are affected. But it's also equity that goes hand in hand with self-interest everywhere in the world. Because if we don't solve those equity problems, we're all going to be affected. And that's what it means when we say it is now a global commons issue. Equity and self-interest come together when we want to solve the water problem, just like when we want to solve the problem of the climate crisis. They go hand in hand. And that shift in thinking is also necessary. Equity is everyone's interest. Everyone's self-interest everywhere in the world. Can I add something just based on what you just said? That's also, of course, true with COVID, right? We are all only as healthy as our neighbor is on our street and our city and our region and our nation and globally. Did we solve that? Like, did we actually manage to vaccinate everyone in the world? No. So highlighting water as a global commons and what it means to work together and see it, both out of that kind of global commons perspective, but also the self-interest perspective, because it does have that parallel, it's not only important, but it's also important because we haven't managed to solve those problems which had similar attributes. And water is something that people understand. Climate change is a bit abstract. Some people understand it really well. Some understand it a bit. Some just don't understand it. Water, every kid knows how important it is to have water when you're playing football and you're thirsty, you need water. So there's also something about really getting citizen engagement around this and really, in some ways, experimenting with this notion of the common good. Can we actually deliver this time in ways that we have failed miserably other times? And hopefully we won't keep failing on the other things, but anyway. Maybe just to add a further point on the costs of all of this. At first glance, it may sound like this is costly because you're going to have to raise a lot more money. The world will have to spend about $300 billion per year in order that low and middle income countries can solve this problem. That the technologies can be scaled up so that everyone has access to clean water and safe sanitation. That sounds like a lot of money, but we today waste far more than $300 billion. There's the economic cost of what's happening today. It's far more than $300 billion. The neglect of water costs far more than $300 billion. So all this is about governance systems. How do you value water? How do you stop the wastage? How do you improve farmers' incomes? Using drip irrigation and other techniques? It's actually about saving money, but you've got to mobilize resources in order to invest in the technologies in order to save money and allow people to have better livelihoods. I mean, just to give two examples. A very large amount of water globally is wasted every day in the way in which municipal authorities run water utilities. A phenomenal wastage of water because it's not being valued, priced or valued properly, plus the systems of governance are not in place. As a result of another example, as a result of a lack of access to easily accessible water in villages across a large part of the developing world, women in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, many other parts of the developing world as well, spend a few hours every day, a few hours every day, going out to get water or firewood every day. If you can make it accessible, imagine what they can do with that time. So there's a huge loss of livelihoods that comes out of what's a very inefficient system of managing water. Stop the wastage, help people have a better livelihood, quite apart from a better quality of life. So when we think of cost, yes, it'll cost something, and the world has to pay for it, but we're actually going to gain a lot in economic terms, which means individual lives, communities' lives will be much better off. Net-net, we're gonna be saving money. Thank you very much on explaining the context and explaining why this is so urgent and the stark reality that we're living in. I wanna save a few minutes for any questions that we might have in the room. Please state your name and your question place and your organization. Yes, hi, I'm Jessica from EcoBusiness in Singapore. My question for the panelists is, what does success look like at the end of this two-year initiative? And then Minister Thaman, if I could also get your opinion on Asia right now is experiencing heat waves and massive water crises. What do you think are some of the immediate steps that we can take? And how will prospect this from Singapore, which has treated water as an existential issue for many years, contribute to this? Thank you. Also the last part, first, then you handle me, what's the final outcome? So Pakistan and Northern India are now experiencing temperatures of about 51 degrees, between 48 and 51 degrees. Unimaginable, unimaginable. But it's not because the people living in that area have done something grossly wrong. It's because of how the world's hydrological cycle has changed, as Johan was explaining. It's a global problem and is going to keep surfacing in different parts of the world in different ways, droughts, floods, or just uninhabitable environments. The solutions exist. In fact, the solutions exist a lot more than the solutions already exist for climate change. They need to be financed. They need to be, we need proper governance and we need to scale up the solutions. If you take a country like Singapore, it's like Netherlands or some other countries where from very early on we realized we were vulnerable. We were vulnerable in different ways, but it created the sense that when you're vulnerable, it's like they say, necessity is the mother of invention, right? Necessity is also the mother of governance. Necessity is the mother of solution-oriented governance. It's a mother of governance arrangements where this is not just the responsibility of water officials or ministry in charge of water. It's a whole of government responsibility and a whole of society responsibility. Everyone has to value water. So, necessity has to be the mother of better governance in the interests of ordinary people everywhere in the world. And that's what we try to do in Singapore. Never perfectly, keep improving, keep innovating, keep willing to pay the cost because not doing it ends up far more costly. So on the outputs, and just before coming to that, but just to re-emphasize the point that, you know, one has to recognize that victim number one of all the global changes we are occurring, I mean, both in terms of climate change and environmental change is water. Water is, you know, it's always too much water or too little water, and the droughts and the heat waves is the first victim which then translates to human impacts. So it's always through water. It's quite important that one has to recognize that adapting to change in the world we live in today is about managing water. What can be outcomes? Well, we've just begun, so it's too early to start listing the results of the commission. But just as Mariana pointed out, we foresee a new paradigm of water as a common good which has to be governed and managed as such at any scale, anywhere in the world, one has to reconnect to the hydrological cycle because for the first time, we now have some scientific evidence that we are impacting the very source of water, namely precipitation. And that, of course, is something we've never had to consider before. We've always been reassured that that's just, a gift from whoever you may refer to, but certainly not something that we're impacting, now we're changing it. So that's number one. Number two is that, of course, it's a review on the economics of water and we will be looking at the value of water and considering different novel economic policy measures which one may be, for example, putting some form of price on water in order to guide and give incentives, but not as a price to punish those who are poor, but rather to reward those that are stewards of fresh water for the common good. So this is quite an exciting moment of potentially giving finally the credit. So not only are we at a position where water is not getting the importance it deserves, but those who actually manage water in a sustainable way are also not getting the benefits that they deserve. And then finally, we are taking on a very broad perspective in this commission. It's not an economics narrow commission. It's really about equity, about governance, about management, and about collaboration. I mean, you can imagine with Ngozi, the director general of WTO, that we're also looking at virtual water trading about how can we collaborate as a world community with regards to safeguarding the flow of virtual water behind all the food that we trade in the world, for example. So we'll be probably having quite a long list of advice and recommendations. Maybe just to add to that, I mean, the idea is that there will be both thought leadership because we do need that kind of new paradigm shift in thinking, but also what we heard during our first commission meetings, we just spent two wonderful days in a retreat in Geneva is actually there are some really interesting solutions on the ground, but they're just peripheral. They're like cute little experiments that someone's doing. What does it mean to scale those up? What does it mean to create a coherent, systemic understanding of those solutions as well as new solutions? But that also requires, I see this in my area, which is economics of innovation, a demand pull. Often, for example, with lots of innovations, they don't actually diffuse and get fully deployed without, for example, procurement policy engaging with it as a funnel for that kind of scaling up. So I think what we also wanna do is to provide some really concrete advice with the policymakers, but again, I was coming back to that public-private partnership of ways to really create leverage and dynamism and that catalytic multiplier effect to these solutions as Tormann often says, we actually have more solutions in water than we do with climate, but then because we don't talk about water and don't put it front and center, nothing kinda happens. So I mean, just to add on to that, the world needs a green revolution to solve the climate crisis, and the next 30 years, step by step, transition in one area after another, is going to be critical. The world has to turn green. It's not gonna succeed unless we have a blue revolution, unless we change fundamentally the way we manage water, globally, and that means going beyond the buzzwords and the interesting pilots and the very interesting small initiatives, but thinking in ecosystem terms. It's global, it requires new governance systems, new financing, new ways of scaling up. Think in ecosystem terms, scale up what works well to a degree that's never been seen before. It's doable. We can solve this problem. On that call to action and new vision for water system management, I would like to- Can't take another question, can you? I'm gonna be trying to be respectful of everyone's time. Can't we just hear them quickly? How about this? As a compromise, we'll take them both at the same time. And very short. Yeah, very short. And succinct, please. You bet you're on. Hi, this is- No, not at the same time. Let's first, this gentleman, please go ahead. Larry Elliott of The Guardian, it's a very short question. Water has always been the correlation of aid budgets, health, yeah, that ticks the box, education, yeah, that ticks the box. Water has always struggled to find donors, even though it's vitally important. So what makes you think you're gonna find $300 billion a year for the foreseeable future to crack this problem when clearly it hasn't been a priority up until now? First of all, that's our ambition. And we have to succeed in this commission and with our report in showing that it's in everyone's interests that we do this. It's affordable and we will all end up better for it. Quick one again. One of the reasons why the Green Revolution seems to be everywhere now and there's momentum is because people see solar and electric cars. You talked about solutions. Can you give examples, even if they're pilot examples or technologies, which you say there are many of how things can actually work out for solving some of these problems? Yeah, I can just take in the most urgent area, which is in the food sector, in food production in the world, what we're seeing today is not only that rainfall is changing, making it much more common with droughts and floods and really, really difficult conditions for farmers across the world. Investments have to be made to drought-proof agricultural systems. We have a whole bundle of technologies to do that from how we manage soils so that they can hold more fresh water. One of the most exciting win-win solutions is that everyone is talking about building more carbon in soils as a climate measure. Well, we know that if you build more carbon in the soils, you get better water holding capacity. So if you get more deeper roots and better cropping systems through modern genetic improvements, for example, the latest findings on developing perennial wheat sorts, can imagine when farmers don't have to plow each year, but instead can have perennial wheat with two-meter deep root levels with organic carbon building up in soils, these are ways of building more drought-proof farming systems, which may sound very basic, but they can be scaled very fast. And it's just like Thomas says, we will be able, on the question previously here, that I'm quite sure that we'll be able to show, even with basic cost-benefit analysis, that everyone will come out winning in the other end. So just to be very clear, this is not a report about raising $200 billion or $300 billion. This is about the report, about serving everyone's interests affordably and in ways that they will be able to see makes a lot of economic sense at the local level, at the individual level and for governments. And our job is to try and make that case compelling. Thank you. Thank you all for making the time. Thank you all in the room for joining us and on the line. Thank you.