 and energy nexus and what's interesting about the food water and energy nexus is that there are synergies among each of the three sectors and one of the things I found interesting about the creating shared value report is that they had an emphasis on, Nestle had an emphasis on the at this intersection if we're gonna go from seven and a half billion people to nine billion people we're gonna have to think about how we balance food water and energy in new ways we're gonna have to have an increased amount of productivity in agriculture we're gonna have to be more creative about the sorts of technologies that we use as well as the sorts of the efficiencies on energy and on water and I think you'll hear about that in this conversation we're very fortunate to have my friend and colleague Joanne and Nestle Tuttle who's the manager of development and public policy at Chevron and Chevron as I mentioned earlier has been our basically the driving force behind our work and helping us with the US leadership and development work about the role of the private sector and development and Joanne used to be here at CSIS and started our work on food security and so she maintains an affiliation here on that very topic so we're very fortunate to have her moderate this conversation and I'm gonna turn it over to her Joanne thanks and good morning everyone I will say from the outset that I'm always a bit challenged when we bring up the food water energy Nexus because to me a Nexus is sort of a circle in the middle where everything comes together but when I think about food water and energy as Dan said I think about a triangle where each point of the triangle directly and deeply affects each of the other points of the triangle but they don't always come together energy and water the water production and water uses and water outcomes of energy production are very important water and agriculture are linked so deeply and so importantly for the future development and production of food sources but it's really hard to talk about all three of them together unless you really zero into something like biofuels or zero in on for example India's case where a large percentage of energy and power is used for water pumps for irrigation for agriculture but today I think we're gonna not dive into those specifics quite so carefully I can talk a little bit about what Chevron does in terms of water but I think that's gonna be less interesting than really focusing in on the agricultural discussion because there is so much to talk about around rising needs and demands for energy for agriculture production and how do you find the water to meet them because for each of the three pieces of this triangle energy can be produced and from different things and in different ways agriculture can be produced with different with different crops in different ways but the one indisputable and immutable component is water you just can't substitute anything for water but there are some different ways to use different kinds of water in different settings so I think that's really what we're going to talk about today so I'm with the most distinguished set of gentlemen I'm like the opposite of Dan who had an all-woman panel and I'm going to introduce them real briefly and we'll hear from them each Anders Burntell is one of the world's leading water experts and has been working on this topic for his entire career out of Sweden he's a sweet I'll say we always appreciate having the Nordic countries represented here and we'll really talk about some of his work followed by Paul Gannett who has been working on food and agriculture and value chains with smallholder farmers for his entire career Peter Lockery is oh sorry Christian Holmes will be next I thought they were switched but Christian is going to talk to us sort of a little bit more broadly about water strategy and water policy and then we're going to close up with Peter at the end talking more about sort of the sanitation health sort of the broader the broader focus on water and water resources so I want to ask each of you to just say a few words about what you do and how you look at the resources and then I'm going to follow up with a few questions and open it to the audience we have until news we have a little over an hour for a discussion so Anders could you please kick us off thank you your honor and thank you also to CSIS and Nestlé for organizing the event and inviting us all here today to discuss these extremely important topics and the Nexus yes definitely what we are doing in our group which is called the 2030 water resource group is very much in within the Nexus in in all the various aspects of it but I will address this more from the water angle because that's our starting point the World Economic Forum in their global annual risk report which is building on the expert opinion about thousand experts business leaders international organization leaders etc has for the last five years ranked water as the amongst one of the five top risks internationally globally and this year it came out as number one which I think says something about what we are challenging water availability and sometimes also water quality poses a real risk to business but also to ecosystems and to people the CDP water disclosure report has over last years also reported on the increasing number of companies that share this belief about the fundamental risk in and in 2014 68% of the companies all of them being among the global 500 companies reported that water poses a substantive risk to their business and 22% actually reported that the issue around water could limit the growth of their business so water does pose a real risk to economies to companies but also to people and ecosystems we the 2030 water resource group we are a public private civil society initiative or partnership that has been established to address those challenges in selected countries around the world we work to create you could say shared value but from a water perspective with a water entry point we were established a couple of years ago by a few companies Nestle one of them but also working together with coke and PepsiCo actually I think we are the only initiative where coke and PepsiCo sits down together at the table to address a common concern but also others bilateral donors SDC and others and IFC got involved IFC International Finance Corporation part of the World Bank Group and we were hosted initially within the World Economic Forum but then since 2012 actually moved here to Washington to be hosted by IFC and the reason we why we were established is beyond really the self-interest of the companies involved and the concern for their own production and manufacturing of products we were established because these companies were concerned about what water scarcity and also other water challenges such as quality will do to the economic development of countries where they are operating so you call it a long term self-interest these companies depend on countries where the economy is growing where development is not jeopardized because of lack of water where there is political stability no social unrest caused by water scarcity etc and where people's livelihoods is improving we're purchasing power increases so we operate in countries where for example Nestle is not sourcing any of its products where they only have sales offices and and we know that water scarcity and water pollution is already today affecting economies in many countries we see investments being stopped because the investors are not sure that the water that is needed for the operation of the production is guaranteed we see that in agribusiness in in Africa hydro power also mining Peru Chinese coal power plants that are not built any longer because of the lack of water etc or where water quality becomes an issue not only for people and ecosystems but also for the industry itself such as the textile industry in Bangladesh and other industries in in China and India so water is really at the core of of the food water energy nexus and we also know of course that the effects of the lack of safe drinking water and inappropriate sanitation has vast effects on the economies of these countries so I said that we are working in in selected countries today it is in in Mexico and Peru in Latin America South Africa Tanzania and Kenya in Africa and we work in India in the states of Kanataka and Maharashtra and now also engaging in the with the federal government government with the big Ganga cleanup program Bangladesh and Mongolia we've also worked earlier in Jordan we will continue to add maybe two more countries per year for the next couple of years what we do in in these countries is I believe rather unique we we create a platform where the government in that country can sit down with a private sector within the country and civil society and discuss together what needs to be done to address the water challenges that they are facing and how they can do that by working together so a multi-stakeholder platform we call it we are there to facilitate but we do not steer the process normally we would look for co-chairs from government and private sector to run these together we would normally start by doing a stakeholder mapping to make sure that we have all the right actors at the table and then doing some initial analytical work on future water demand based on the country's growth scenarios for agricultural development for manufacturing industry for energy production for urbanization so how much water would you need to realize that growth and and normally what we see there is that there is a gap between demand future demand and current supply because growth is thirsty every production has a huge water footprint in particular agribusiness of course so the next question is how can we close that gap between demand and supply what are the most cost effective solutions that we can come up with and again we can help with doing some economic analysis and normally reducing the demand is the most cost effective solution so moving away from inefficient flood irrigation to drip irrigation in agriculture or reducing the municipal leakage in the urban water supply system or recycling reducing wastewater between industry and municipalities or vice versa so identifying the most cost effective option opportunities in the country and then we help these multi-stakeholder platforms to develop concrete proposals together in these different areas today we have such platforms up and running now in seven of the countries where we are operating and working now to establish two or three more and in these countries they have themselves divided them into two working groups so we have 21 working groups in these seven countries all in all covering 180 different organizations of which 100 is companies but also government entities and civil society organizations sitting together in these working groups and developing concrete proposals together for their countries so concrete programs are coming up in various countries such and some of them are PPPs but some of them can also be purely governmental programs and initiatives we have a so called no drop war program in in South Africa which is really about reducing the municipal leakage so 38% of the water that is produced by municipalities in South Africa is just leaking away and not put into practice practice use so we have an incentive programs by the government two municipalities to reduce that leakage with half in Peru and Mongolia interesting enough the private sector themselves said to the government that we don't think that the current tariff system for water supply for us as industry is effective it doesn't really create an incentive to us to reduce the water consumption you guys you government needs to to increase the tariffs put in a new tariff system in in place and we can help you to develop that but also PPP programs for example a program between the mining industry coal mines so energy nexus again coal mines in South Africa collecting all the wastewater that is normally polluting for everyone downstream as it mine drainage and collecting that and treating it and then with the most advanced technology reverse osmosis etc and then selling it as drinking water supply to downstream municipalities so and quite innovative PPP solution or a statewide program in in India where we have the local banks working together with the sugar industry the government and the farmers to come up with financial solutions to make the sugar small holder farmers producing sugarcane to move away from flood irrigation to drip irrigation for example so various ways of closing the gap between the modern supply in the country increasing the water security for the benefit of people ecosystems but also the economy and thereby indirectly for the companies themselves so what we do is to address an old challenge in in a new and innovative way I've been working with the government on on water for large part of my career and water is definitely a governmental responsibility there's no question about that but government needs to work with others to change the way that water is used in reality on the ground and the private sector is a large user of water in particular within the agribusiness supply chain of course Peter Brabeck the chairman of Nestle who is also the chair of my group the 2030 water resource group he often describes us as a positive disruptor that's his word a meaning that we engage in an area that has been dominated by the public state sector forever and create a new momentum in that sector by bringing new actors to the table and I believe it works and I believe that we can show that it does thank you great thank you that was a great overview and starting point Paul we want to turn to you and I think often when I think about agriculture and water I think about water-saving technologies through inputs and seeds I also think about really strong but pretty basic land management practices and in water conservation practices so I'm hoping that you'll maybe describe some of the work the ACDI has done in these areas and give your thoughts thank you I'm I'm humbled to be here and I have to show you I came with my notes for today and have been so stimulated by by the discussion that this is now my page of printed notes with comments and inserts about things that I have to change what I'm saying so let me let me just begin by saying why are we why are we here talking about the role of the private sector in agricultural development we we this large community and we're all on the same team have been wrestling with the developing economies and and and faced with malnourishment across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia we're now seeing a new opportunity for the private sector no one's mentioned yet so I'll toss it in here the the ratio of investment private to public that has shifted historically so that now private sector is the big king and the development assistance has to become catalytic we heard we heard Margaret describing you say it's feed the future program now embracing the private sector so that in fact the role of the implementation partners and lots of us are here today for development assistance we need to leverage inclusive investment and I think that we do that by lowering the financial risk of investing in small holder agriculture I think that that we do that with organization of rural communities of producer groups training infrastructure support teaming introductions lots of people talked about making constructive dialogue happens so that you can overcome that divide that mistrust whether it's between the public sector and the private sector or civil society and the private sector new investment is coming and it's coming in and it's all of our jobs to catalyze that and optimize that and make it as inclusive as we can I think that historically we've seen specialty crops make a deeper more profound move faster because that's their raw material I think we're seeing a secondary wave by the input supply companies seed and fertilizer and tools because they see up a market there but they're coming gently and they're they're initially going in with a with an agency rep in the capital city and seeing if they can grow their business a lot more cautiously than the specialty crops folks have I think that the the implementation partners for the donors who are who are trying to act as interpreters or translators between economic development and private investment are doing it around building farmer awareness of business skills market savvy market information we heard some descriptors above the I just want to quick cite some examples DuPont pioneer and and usades feed the future program have done a nice job of partnering and building off each other the largest fresh horticulture exporter in Kenya veg pro has moved into Ghana with help from the Millennium Challenge Authority and and is producing small holder extra fine green beans for export to Europe like they were doing from Kenya they're now doing from Ghana there's a sequential PPP that I want to describe a small you said enterprise development program in India ran for a couple years did some good work it was ending the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said this is good work can we can we support that for another year low and behold before that ended Walmart stepped in and said we've got a bunch of supermarkets here that need fresh horticulture could you organize those women to supply fresh horticulture to the supermarkets so before you knew it a little stimulus planting by you said supported by Gates turns into a commercial Walmart product supply channel there's a new again innovation from the specialty crops the coffee quality Institute is the nonprofit arm of the specialty coffee Association of America they're just spearheading a new collaborative research initiative on gender best practices in the global coffee industry and and AC Davoca stepped into this partnership Mars drinks is on board Ampho tech and Falcon coffees and and CQI is asking for more partners in this initiative rural electrification had a big role to play it means that agribusiness becomes possible it means that education becomes possible it facilitates the gender the gender panel that ran just before us was was inspiring the gender role and nutrition are coming out of the labor savings from rural electrification I went back to my Peace Corps village last year 40 years later and found that the rural electrification had arrived and instead of the women spending all day pulling up water in rubber buckets from 25 meters down there were five capped wells with robin is going to five areas in the village so the women didn't have to spend all day pulling up water so 40 years ago no vegetables poor nutrition we ate grain we ate dried fish from the river which was primarily fish bones this time vegetables every meal great food and the education of the women had paralleled this labor saving so instead of just two primary classrooms there was now a lisae in that village because of electrification because of education girls were going through high school and then working there in that village which is becoming a city they're not migrating to the one last comment from Michael Levitt replication over innovation what we're trying to do is complex and it's big but there are so many easy solutions right there it merely takes more effort and more application to take some good model of a GDA that's worked take it to five more countries there's a lot of work to do final drop comment thank you Anders though the role of governments in creating the enabling environment we've kind of given them an easy past today I think are there commercial laws are there commercial courts will contracts be be respected and enforced infrastructure is banking allowed to function is an insurance industry allowed to function maybe I just stopped there lots of ideas about private sectors energy and finance great thank you Paul and we'll come back to you with some follow-up questions we'll turn now to Christian Holmes you are the water coordinator for USAID and have done a lot of different things in your career not just on water but on energy and and other issues as well so we wanted to just ask you to kind of give an overview of the water and development strategy and talk a little bit about each of the components as you see it great so it's all right with you would you be alright if I stood up over there because I can't see the people over there so I just wanted to see you you know you have these wonderful flashbacks so I see over there thinking I can't see I can't see and I flashed back to my son when he was two and little he was going I can't see okay so enough of that so I am very happy to be here I've worked professionally with everybody around the table it's just a fabulous phenomena that such enormous talent is being attracted to this field of water food and energy in the nexus between the two I'm also accompanied today by a number of my eight colleagues including Margaret in a spear is who's been a great leader in food for peace and others from the office of water so in my five minutes what I'd like to do very briefly is address the points that John has suggested begin a little bit with my perspective on the challenge we face the system's response to that challenge what we're doing in one element of the nexus in water in particular but also talk about how links into food and energy and then also talk a little bit about the science and technology engagement of the private sector dimension of this so to start with a challenge it is it is to me amazing to think that if we stay on this trajectory by 2030 our planet is going to have 8.3 billion people it's just an enormous dynamic and it's also amazing to think that if we stay on this trajectory of increased significant demand for water food and energy that by 2030 there'll be 31 countries on this planet with a total of 1.4 billion people in them that will face both water scarcity and crop land scarcity so this challenge is enormous and it's it's difficult to put it into numbers you have to almost be there and see it and people like Peter Lockley that have spent a lifetime in the field really touching the problem have a unique perspective of that so in terms of the response to all of this we've talked about the nexus today and the nexus is basically a system it's essentially how does food and energy and water come together and just as an observation on systems because I noticed there are a number of people who I think are still students or graduate students are beginning their careers that this field of systems and systems management as it relates to food water and energy is is enormously significant it's wide open it's needed and very promising and it's terribly complex because it's not just the macro systems of how to food water and energy you know Lincoln like a hydropower facility that produces water so we can have energy to help grow food but rather it's the complex subsystems within each of these elements of food water and energy and how those subsystems come together to really synergize and it's an understanding of how systems lead to results a system without a result is not a system it's something else it's an amoeba and it's how do the systems generate consequences and what are the anticipated failures and what are the anticipated successes and being able to evaluate them and upon our ability to understand systems and to manage them I think our ability to help feed the world meet their energy needs or water needs or food needs is highly dependent so one element of the system is water and at aid I've had the privilege to work with a wonderful team of people within AID and in the stakeholders community to develop AID's first water strategy and AID basically will spend over a five-year period when you look at its total spend on water somewhere between 500 and 600 million dollars a year so over a five-year period that gets up to three billion dollars which is a significant investment and so as we began to develop the strategy the first question I asked was well you know and started to investigate the team I was part of where are the water systems what do they look like how are they formed and within the context of the development community it was hard to find a lot within the context of the work that Anders had done at CUI and others had done at the World Economic Forum there was some groundbreaking work being done there which I should acknowledge but the field of understanding what constitutes a water system seemed to me to be surprisingly general it was a great room a great need for improvement and it was a very difficult task to develop a strategy without having systems to refer to so heuristically we looked at systems that related to water and we looked at the Bureau of Food Security System at AID and the very interesting work they were doing on supply chain and value chains and the integration of the two and identifying certain points along those chains to really make a difference and I want to return to that in a moment so the long and short of it is to do a system you have to have results and we set a target of reaching 16 million people over five years with water with water and sanitation within the government context that's hard to do because you're making a statement that there are going to be resources available over a five-year period to reach a specific target but nevertheless we were able to prevail and we got that agreed to and then secondly a system without a focus just floats around so within that context we made a decision to come up with target countries and criteria based on need and opportunity to drive us towards those target countries to meet what we felt were the most pressing needs and we tiered those countries the first tier turned out to be very heavily focused in Africa in particular Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan, the DRC, and Liberia which is where the bulk of the countries in that tier are. We also adopted a number of approaches that we felt were pretty critical clearly science reliance and science technology innovation and partnerships are the core to almost any approach we're taking at aid right now but added to that are the principles of integration the engagement of women in the response to the unique requirements that women have in order for example to be given a to be given opportunities in schools so they can stay in schools and cannot young women in the absence of proper water sanitation and hygiene. We took a very hard look as we went through this on the issue of sustainability and what constitutes sustainability and how do you achieve it at the end of the day the strategy was accepted and we've been in the process of implementing it and let me tell you having a systems approach has made the world of difference in what we do at aid because we can concentrate our resources where they need to be this is not a perfect system it's the beginning but it's far better than where we were before the congress picked up on the strategy and the system and decided they wanted to see it stay in place and so on Christmas Eve they codified it there was only one of two bills that were passed by unanimous consent in the last congress and I think that's very significant in terms of the commitment that we all have to the development sector and to water energy and food so to shift for a moment to the science and technology side which I know is of interest to you clearly the engagement of partners and the reliance on market-based tools is critical to meeting needs of this enormity and clearly we're going to need breakthroughs of significant size in order to be able to cope with these immense trajectories you know one of the critical trajectories is urbanization and particularly as it relates to coastal areas and we look at that process right now and most of the major coastal cities are Deltaic they're on major river systems and the impact already of huge numbers of populations moving into these coastal areas and what it means for coastal aquifers the salinization of the aquifers and the destruction of marshlands in those areas and how that relates to the sustaining of human populations is key and towards that end recently aid issued something known as a grand challenge for securing water and that grand challenge has three calls one call was issued a year ago in conjunction with our partners the Swedes and the Dutch and as a result of that call we've already begun to develop not to develop actually but to work with companies to bring to market seeds for example that are highly resistant to saline soils and saline waters particularly seeds that relate to potato crops and quinoa of all things but very needed secondly we issued a call about six months ago related to the development of technology that would deal with the desalination of brackish water and in so doing those technologies and those responses are coming in and we'll be testing them in the field this summer in Mexico with the Bureau of Reclamation Center I personally am extremely interested in the nexus the link between desalination and solar because I think in many ways that's the holy grail so many different solar applications as we proceed and go forward the Bureau of Food Security in many ways has been a pathfinder and leader in partnering and they have an effort called partners for innovation they're I'm sure Marguer's discussed this but just their work in drip tech irrigation alone but coming up with low energy required technologies and supporting a company called drip tech which has been extremely effective in India and elsewhere and finding I think you've heard about the powering for ag innovations that have been been developed by aid where we're looking for ways in which to to facilitate food production but by using clean clean energy and recently we've been working with a company called Promethean Energy that's been using a phase-based battery system in order to ensure significant improvements in the cooling of milk in rural areas in India so those are just some snapshots of where we are so you know in summary these are really tough problems and you know we're talking about dates of 2025 that's only 10 years from now that's just right around the corner and and I think that to really be impactful the combination of understanding the problem particularly by using a systems-based approach to what you're doing and the combination of really imaginatively relying on a wide range of partners and looking for significant breakthroughs in both approaches as well as technology are going to mean the world a difference to hundreds of millions of people thank you great thank you so much let's turn next to peter who really who works with care is director here's water program focuses a lot on the water and sanitation agenda and love to hear from you good morning and many thanks to CSIS for the invitation to speak I'm very happy to be here well I'd love to talk about wash and its relationship to nutrition and and to agriculture but I'm going to pull myself out of my comfort zone this morning and talk about water for agriculture the water food nexus that we've been working on for the last few years you know what happened about two and a half years ago is it became very clear that cares focus on food and nutrition security I was to manage a water team then I had to pay attention to the water food nexus that's what my internal clients wanted so we started thinking about it and you know the first thing that came to our attention was that this is a you know a complex global scale problem which is difficult to represent in a in a way that is both true and actionable we tend to frame a problem from pre-existing perspectives that may emit vital clues to solutions nowhere is this truer than when trying to understand the complex issues concerning water agriculture energy and development in the early 2000s the stock home world water fee focused on the water crisis that seemed inevitable given the projected need for more food the thirst of agricultural systems and the increasing scarcity of water for agriculture and other needs 15 years later and despite the passing of such programs as the CGIAR program challenge program for water and food we seem little closer to full addressing some of the very important issues that arise the main obstacle so it seems to us to complete an actual understanding of the problem lies at the food and water nexus appears to be one of framing the problem people still approach the problem from either a water and agriculture or a socioeconomic perspective people rarely put all these fields together to support balanced and sustainable development ministries remain segregated into water agriculture and insight is streamed separately that way you know a recent paper by a leading agronomist describes the constraints to achieving potential crop yield waters mentioned but not prominently in fact water is considered as a resource delivered to the crop rather than a resource shared within a much broader system water flows are omitted from this author's description of the system alternatively a description from a water specialist adopts a more hydrologic perspective and focus on resource flows without identifying major changes in agricultural efficiency yet another paper strives for greater balance around the issues of food security but does not intersect strongly with issues of either water or energy security none of these views is correct in none of these views is incorrect but none is complete to donors and collaborators including governments water for agriculture is a loose assemblage of concepts some of which have an unclear impact on development most donors and investors know that 70 percent of blue water is used for agriculture but translating this to increased efficiency on the ground is challenging because of the variety of changes that are necessary not the least of which is a better understanding and more efficient use of green water if we want to attract investment we have to do better in defining what works and what the benefits are in our work we try to identify the effect of changes that farmers can make to themselves and to global food and water security by drawing evidence together under an umbrella concept that we call water smart agriculture which is actually a series of concepts that bridge between different fields water smart agriculture imply it includes multiple pathways to improvement of farming systems managing soil water to reduce drought risk is part of water smart agriculture so too is using fertilizers to increase water use so too is exploiting niche opportunities for high value crop so too is rewarding farmers for protecting water supply there are literally dozens of practices that could be classed as water smart agriculture and therein of course lies the problem what we've done is to try and develop four principles or behavior to guide activities toward it's a common goal of helping smallholder farmers escape poverty through better water management although we've developed the principles and behaviors they're a guide we're expecting and we have expected and the local groups have done this they've developed local solutions but within the boundaries of the principles in other words the principles are guiding not prescriptive first principle is around achieving optimality assisting farmers to identify and apply the optimal water management regime based on improving water capture storage and use including from rainfall surface flow and groundwater the central feature of optimality is ensuring that the ultimate delivery system the soils are continually enhanced and supported in providing nourishment to crops second principle is ensuring sustainability water conservation and efficient use is central toward smart agriculture but is so is bringing more water into farming systems in order to capture opportunities for value enhancement including in dry periods between established cropping seasons nevertheless sustainability is a core principle ensuring that resource utilization does not have negative environmental consequences elsewhere that there are no deleterious trade-offs with other users or users such as domestic household supplies and that the wider resource space can remain in equilibrium or be enhanced in the long term third principle is transitioning to prosperity it's about using water more effectively and equitably to reduce risk for farmers increase their value added and sees otherwise unattainable opportunities to shift from low input output subsistence farming to more profitable and food secure production systems a central core is the conviction that better water management is a key to unlocking future prosperity and the fourth principle is building in learning and sharing water smart agriculture is smart through sharing and learning experience of what works within and between different contexts learning approaches including working with farmers extension systems learning and practice alliances farmer field schools and other forms of sharing innovation are widely regarded as critical to enabling the uptake and dissemination of different approaches this is an essential element of water smart agriculture and helps to create maintain and evolve practice that can inform policies at all levels so what are we gaining what are we guiding a behavior towards what are the identifiable and quantifiable outcomes there are four of them first very straightforward to increase the productivity of water that is used by agriculture second is to increase the productivity to improve livelihoods third is to optimize use and minimize harm and the fourth is to share and include well it's still very much a working progress and actually I get quite nervous when we present it to an audience such as this I'm sure that there are lots of holes in it but maybe you'll be kind in the way you ask questions thank you thank you so much I you you really drove home a number of points I think that everyone's hit on and care is always such thoughtful I'm sure much deliberated approaches to things but one thing that you said in the beginning which is your comfort zone is not this area and I think that that is is really true across the board because these are three if you want to throw an energy deeply technical fields where people who are experts on water and on agriculture on energy are so technical that it's difficult to pull up from the very deep capabilities and start to look really more broadly and get a base level of understanding of the other two sectors in a way that helps people feel comfortable talking about them so way to get out of your comfort zone everybody's going to need to get out of their comfort zone to get to the more systems approach that we've talked about I wanted to just follow up with the panel and hello to you all over there we won't forget you in the questions I want to just follow up on a couple of themes that came up and then we'll open to audience questions in a few minutes. A very important point that you made Anders is essentially that water saved is water gained and for a long time there's there's always been discussion about pricing water and increasing pricing for water but I think you've made a point that that probably is more promising which is saving water and incentives to save water is a really important starting point the the Millennium Challenge Corporation has a major effort to revive and and sort of rebuild the water infrastructure in Morocco it's an important piece of the MCC Compact and trying to sell it to the public as as you are buying into this you're going to pay for your regular utility bills but it's going to be a long-term investment in our success so I want to ask each of you or each of you who cares to comment about water systems and savings I had just one more personal comment I always felt that if you're in a water-rich area you were really blessed here in Washington one September we'd add 14 inches of rain which is a bit more than we might want but in speaking to someone who farms in California he said oh my gosh we get 12 inches a year for lucky and so far this year we've got four and it's great if you have a lot of water but there's a lot that communities and countries can do to manage their resources through infrastructure through practices and I'd like to have anyone who would like to comment maybe starting with you Anders to talk about some of those systems and maybe a little bit deeper on your comments about the no-drop approach in South Africa and some of the other ways you've looked at saving water rather than sort of trying to price it or look at other schemes thank you yeah when we do some some of the analytical work we do in countries one of the pieces of analytical work would normally be so-called marginal cost curve and if you're an economist that's sort of standard tool that you're using in in analyzing the cost effectiveness of various operations of various interventions sort of and what we do normally in a country where we are in a situation where we realize we need to to really address various issues of saving water various opportunities to save water we do that kind of marginal cost curve analytics and and by doing that we can actually identify what are the most cost-effective levers and surprisingly enough for some of those interventions you realize that you would not only save water by doing them but also actually saving economically by doing them and in particular those that have a high cost of energy involved in them such as pumping water long distances etc you would actually save also economically and and surprisingly enough none none have really sort of been able to act on on those issues based on on these kind of analytics before and I think it's basically basically because the the relationship between sort of water and the economic dimensions of it has is not fully understood so we take sort of normally a quite an economic approach to this we have been criticized for that also because there are so many other aspects around sort of the the choice of various interventions that needs to be made there are the social implications there might be environmental implications there might be even political implications when it comes to to sort of water allocation etc so we realize that it's much broader than than having just an economic perspective on on the various choices that we have to make but we we start with the economic dimension and then put the facts and figures on the table for these kind of multi-stakeholder platforms that we have to themselves discuss and and come up with the best solutions putting all the social environmental political dimensions on the table but indeed in in many of those cases we can come up with very cost-effective solutions I mentioned some of them the no-drop program in South Africa is a continuation of of some other governmental programs that they've had for the municipal water supply system they only had a so-called blue drop program which was about the coverage of water to two citizens then they had a green drop program which was focusing on the quality of the water that was distributed and now they came up with this no-drop program which means that now we have to cut the losses of water in our systems and and they are rolling out that now it's an incentive scheme that is monitoring the performance of all the municipalities and then publicly disseminating the results so it's really about naming and shaming the mayors no mayor wants to be at the bottom of the list when it comes to the performance of of his water utility so it's it's a sort of political incentive coupled then with also economic incentives from the government to municipalities and already today I think it is eight of the bigger municipal sort of areas that have signed up to reduce the leakage which is actually covering 90 percent of the bulk water supply in South Africa to reduce the leakage with 50 percent within three or four years great and if do others want to comment on sort of behavior modification conservation practices other ways to save and better utilize water in the in the let me give you two examples challenges in the urban and then in the rural context so in the urban context where we see these massive migrations occurring right now and will will continue to occur a huge problem is essentially how do you maintain if you have if you have pipe systems either on a distributed basis or on a larger basis in the urban area is a how do you maintain the pipes and b how do you recover your costs unrecovered water unrecovered cost is something known as non-revenue water it's a massive problem and it's a disincentive to having effective utilities provide water unless that problem can be can be overcome so to save water in that context means interventions where you are building up the local capacity of utilities in large and small cities and utilities within even smaller environments and to do that it requires one working very closely with governments on the capacity building to requires a lot of patience because I talked about results earlier but in some cases when you enhance the capacity of an entity like utility it's hard to show immediate results and an impact based on your financial contribution but I think this this focus this increased focus on utility capacity strengthening to save water is absolutely critical and that relates both to the urban areas and peri urban areas where there's been some extension of pipes in the rural areas one of the most important things is to make the argument that there's a reason to save water on a on a projected up basis everybody in the middle of a drought knows there's a reason to save water but sometimes that's too late but by making a projection into the future and working with farmers and showing the ways in which to save water based upon that projection great things can happen so there's a program that we at aid have supported with other partners called the productive productive safety net program PSNP and that was based essentially on taking a look at fuse net which is the famine early warning system remote sensing system projections as the likelihood of drought in targeted regions in Ethiopia identifying a population of six million people that the Ethiopian government other partners felt were particularly vulnerable and then taking that data and making the argument the day there had to be something done financially you know in terms of how you're going to use your aid funds to support things like water catchments which are pretty critical to savings and secondly working with local farmers to make tough decisions like do they sell off part of their livestock in anticipation of less water for themselves in their livestock the the secondary in the rural context is saving water but using very traditional means to do so and catchments of course are pretty traditional so we have a project called farmer based natural resource regeneration and it's been going on in West Africa for some time in Mali in particular and it's essentially focused on taking traditional technologies for water capture and water saving them and bringing them back in essence and these technologies include something known as zai catchments zai and they're really simple pits they're two feet deep and about three feet wide that are put into hard pack in areas where you know rains will come but it's very hard to capture that rain but by doing that and having these pits ready for the rainfall and lining the pits where there are leaves you can find for nitrogen fixation miraculous things occur in terms of supporting both crops and ultimately tree production through those pits and the regeneration of groundwater so those are a few ways of approaching this a few years ago we worked on a local water management program in the Middle East in Egypt on the West Bank and in Jordan and in Egypt I think thanks to a sort of very far-sighted minister at the time we had a sort of significant impact on water management down to the tertiary canals in Egypt at the tertiary canal level we just couldn't get over the fact that people have been irrigating using flood irrigation turning the water on in the morning going to market coming home turning it off and that's how they irrigated we just couldn't find a way of sort of incentivizing a change they had the rights and they were going to use those rights and the implications for the people the farmers downstream was that they didn't get any irrigation water they had to use drainage water so more recently because we've started talking to our agricultural colleagues in Egypt we figured out that you know with a set of interventions some of which are about water-saving lining canals some are about include varieties sort of reducing evaporation etc etc we've now got a package of interventions that not only saves 25 percent of the water but also substantially increases the productivity of the farmers so there's a huge incentive for the farmers to buy in I mean that's the power of the nexus in my mind I mean you should say that you should have realized that three or four years ago well we didn't because we weren't talking to the right people we were talking to the ministry of water and not to the ministry of agriculture but to me that's a small example of the of the power of the the nexus thank you I'm just going to draw a quick comparison between water saved is water gained in the in the food domain it was mentioned in the previous panel the the estimated 30 percent post harvest losses in food in developing countries that's that's the easiest food gain just by covering just by cleaning and drawing on a plastic sheet reducing the losses by half causes a 15 percent increase in food supply with with further on gains in nutrition water saved is water gained food not lost is food available and probably water saved and water is not because it's all of the resources it's labor it's it's it's finance that's going into producing it tragic to lose a third of it after you harvest and and I think dan will talk about this but he's going to have a report out on reducing post harvest loss and some approaches to that in the next month or so so that's a good follow-up discussion i'm going to stand here so i don't miss the folks on this side of the room for our q and a period let's bundle a few questions we can start with tony and then woman in the red jacket and then over here in the gray hi i'm tony carol miss associate here at the africa studies program among many other things anders you threw out the issue of sanitation but not much discussion sued from that and i'm wondering about the evolution of technological solutions and sanitation moving from sort of macro to micro solutions one of the things that keeps me up at night is the infrastructural demands and urbanization in africa particularly and i'm wondering water supply certainly a big issue but the implications on health public health particularly from bad sanitation are a potentially catastrophic so perhaps with your your welter of experience in water and research wondering what you can inform us or enlighten us on the air breakthroughs in sanitation because of if africa is urbanizing at the rates that it's urbanizing we've got real challenges hi i'm jennifer bremer from arizona state university in addition to you know the importance of saving water i would also say that water saved is energy saved because so frequently for cities um energy is mostly being used to move water and which is extremely expensive so as water services and sand extends it becomes a real budget problem so there's also very definitely an energy money water linkage great okay i think we found another nexus here good um in the next question thank you i'm darsio callahan from food and water watch um my question slash comment is also directed to anders bruntel so the data shows that household water consumption is not responsive to changes in price and and on the flip side of that agricultural use and industrial use is very price responsive so i'm curious to know what your plans are regarding the tariffs in peru and is it not controversial for uh even though it's a multi-stakeholder initiative for the 2030 water resources group to be engaged in those conversations around tariffs and pricing isn't that something that should be left for the folks who live in the watershed and the government okay so we had a bundle of questions that we're going to come to back to you in the next round so let's take those questions um whoever would like to respond first and not everyone has to respond christian go ahead just hit your button make sure to put your microphone on so on breakthroughs uh in sanitation that's a very tough problem to put it mildly and much and in some ways more difficult than breakthroughs in in water treatment um i i think i think the breakthroughs are going to be kind of in three areas one will definitely be in the treatment of human feces and we've done some work through a partnership with gates called wash for life where we're looking at ways in which to both to treat human waste in such a way that it can be converted into a marketable commodity and that's kind of a holy grail that some way something can be done fairly simply and safely to be able to convert waste into something that can be used for uh uh agriculture and other purposes um to go back to the point about systems uh AIDS got a global development laboratory that was launched about a year ago they've identified an initial set of high priority problem sets where people are trying to really delve down into what is the problem um around a certain development need and so urban sanitation is one of the first problem sets that they've been launching and i've been working on that and we're right back to trying to understand the system as it relates to sanitation in very large urban areas and in what are the what are the breakdowns and the flaws and until we understand that better in the gaps um it's very difficult to move ahead and so we're in that process i think i think knowledge in terms of the impact of sanitation on the human system is critical because it a helps us survive and b it makes a stronger case for why sanitation programs are so critical so i think the groundbreaking work in my judgment that's being done by Dr. Jean Humphrey at Johns Hopkins University on environmental interopathy and better understanding the migration of E. Coli uh from human species being ingested moving into the gut and then into the blood system and how it in turn relates to proteins and impacts both cognitive and physical growth is critical and i think the further work the more we understand about the dynamic of what goes on on the interrelationships between different pathogens and chemicals in the human system that are ingested where the vectors are either fishies or some other compound or organism in untreated water um is also absolutely critical to both protect people and to make a better case for why sanitation should be very high on the list uh christian did you want to come in then paul uh well thank you um firstly on on the issue of sanitation just to make the point that we as a group um are not established to to address sort of providing of of drinking water and sanitation to to rural areas we are focusing on the challenges of the water resource as such so that's our starting point uh nevertheless we do work on on in particular waste water issues in in the urban settings and where we do have programs now where we will develop both methodologies but also financial solutions for sort of ppp's to to collect the waste water produced more effectively and then make sure that we can reuse and recycle to other kinds of uses within industry or for agricultural purposes etc so that's one focus areas that that we are working on um in general i think when it comes to uh providing uh treatment of waste water and and waste water in developing countries and and the rapidly expanding uh cities that we see around the world i don't think it's a viable model to replicate the kind of systems that we have in north america or europe the big centralized solutions that we are used to here where we collect the waste water from everywhere into one central point and and then treat it there i think we need to to look for more decentralized solutions where we can close the loop uh within smaller geographical areas i think that's the the way forward when it comes to to handling of waste water um on on sort of even more small-scale sanitation solutions i i think that there are opportunities indeed for turning human waste into a commodity and i'm aware of some NGOs that actually have worked quite effectively in doing that uh teaming up with the companies that are producing fertilizers or or improved soil and selling that and actually i think it's a an american NGO uh water for people that has been developing that uh methodology quite effectively uh where the company that is producing these fertilizers and and improved soil is actually providing or selling the toilet the eco sand toilet to families and they are paying with their waste uh for it which is quite innovative and after a certain time the toilet has been paid and actually the family can then sell their waste and and get financial contribution compensation for it which i think is a very good idea um on the issue of pricing um actually the the focus of our work there on improving the the tariff system and increasing the level of the tariffs is for the industrial use so it's not for the household use and and it's quite clear that i mean we will not have the industry sitting and discussing with the government what the level of tariffs for individual consumers in household should be it it's for the industrial commercial use of of water that they are discussing but even that is is quite innovative and i know for example in mongolia where the minister of of green growth environment development water um told us that she had had that struggle within the cabinet within the government uh where ministries of energy and industry and so on and so on had opposed the the higher levels of tariffs so that was of course music to her ears when she could come back to her minister colleagues and say that well now we have a request from the private sector to actually change the tariff structure in our country and increase the levels uh for their own use and and i think that will be extremely interesting to see when we get the proposal ready and and moving towards implementation thank you okay paul and then peter a quick comment i i'm i'm seeking the the holy grail of the food water energy nexus um from the food perspective it's it's fairly clear that investment drives conservation the whether this is in coffee washing stations or irrigated food crop commercialization the the markets call for sanitation standards sanitary phytosanitary trade regulations certification programs traceability requirements all drive the more financial considerations of a food business the investment means water savings energy savings ultimately cost savings that make good business sense that's my comment concisely put thank you a few years ago there was a paper written on um how access to sanitation in the uk plotted uh gdp so there is a sort of ongoing debate amongst you know people who uh work in the sanitation field as to whether we can buck the trend or not whether we can uh you know we can move faster than that in uh in the developing world and i would say that we are already bucking the trend and i think the one of the big reasons is uh it's because uh the private sector is beginning to engage in sanitation for example you see uh you know organizations in Nairobi uh uh franchising toilets fresh life toilets uh you see others working on uh marketing or treating and marketing uh excreta uh fecal material uh and also looking at uh you know how uh urine uh can be utilized so i think you know the signs are there that we are bucking the trend and we're going to do better than the uk in the developing world we're not going to just be limping along with gdp but we are going to uh see some more rapid change it occurs to me that while agriculture people can't help but talk about manure sanitation and water people cannot help but talk about toilets um we are running up against lunch so what i'm going to do we're going to do a lightning round take three or four questions i'm going to give each person 60 seconds to respond and then we'll close for lunch so the gentleman here had his hand up before and let me see who else would like to put out a question oh a woman right here will be next okay very excellent insights from the panels thank you my question is uh is to Paul about building farmers capacity building awareness for supply skills for farmers how do you begin that where do you start also you mentioned replication of our innovation could you name more models and then to Peter the water smart agriculture is that a replicable model could you pass the microphone right to the gentleman next to you we'll take that question next um read mackey child labor coalition i was wondering if um there are some crops that use a lot of water some of them use a lot of child labor like cotton um alfalfa um is not one that uses a lot of child labor but um are there are we reaching a point where there are crops that need to be phased out because they use so much water and water is becoming so precious um interesting so woman in the pink sweater interesting question when we hear you think about rice production uh my name is julia to a career uh i'm just want to thank uh mr home i'm from alley and the way i grew up we really don't have no water we use to ask younger work wake up at four o'clock in the morning going to the world to get water and up to now the our area still everybody knows mally is the landlord and we have three months of rain so when mr ander is talking about saving water we really we don't even have enough so i would thank mr home of actually having a program of saving water in mally but my question is most of this program that they are talking about water saving or about water is like for the uh city center or the urban area and uh as my friend here you're talking about the agriculture agriculture and water is leaking together having three months of rain in a country of landlord where they know we don't we maybe one river going across the country other area does not have river how to deal with a problem like that excellent question so you each have 60 seconds to wrap up your response anders we're gonna let you start we're gonna go down the line well thank you i i will start with the last question there i mean how do you save water when there is no water um which is very good and i think in in some of the countries that we are working in there is water uh but only for a very limited time period so you have a peak of maybe one and a half month when the rain comes and then it's dry the rest of the year we're working in tanzania we're actually according to to the the calculations that we have made 80 percent of the water that is falling down as rain over the country is lost uh going out with the rivers and not put into any kind of practical use or economic use so that's the main challenge for that country it's like you have a huge gold reserve and and 80 percent of it is is actually not used so what we're doing there is to improve improve the storage capacity uh and putting in in programs where we can increase the storage at community level at the small scale it's not about the big dams infrastructure investments it's at the local level where you can actually make sure that you can store that valuable resource that is given to us thank you 60 seconds at the the driver for for farmer behavior change the the the tautology the universal truth is that farmers the world over really simply want to feed their families and educate their children we find the successful MO to be community level group action helping people realize that they have common problems common challenges and and and building trust that some of those problems can best be overcome by working together the three month rainy season obviously you have to optimize your crop and the the three month farmer hopes to feed his family for the following nine months and have sufficient seed remaining to plant a new crop I think that there are there are two measures there one is first of all you optimize your crop the simple measures of planting and rows and cultivating with improved varieties will give you a larger yield then then reduce the losses during that nine month period preventing the birds the rats the moisture uh from turning your food to poison is going to be the next secret there there's no trick about it simple methodologies drying better in the sun before hermetically sealing uh will prevent the losses Christian sorry as Andrew said there's there are ways to capture water uh and I've seen things in my lifetime which are almost miraculous where there are parts of the world that you wouldn't think could survive that almost look like edens in terms of the way in which they have been able to capture it um how you transfer that knowledge to different parts around the world is a big challenge to say the least I do think that uh there's then the second question once you've captured it is how to use it far more efficiently than it's ever been used before and that gets into these uh I think relatively rapid developments and improvements in technology such as drip irrigation at the same time uh to stay with the theme of water shortages and capturing water and using it and to your point sir about alternate crops that's a big piece of the equation so the work that's being done on drought resistant seeds and some of the progress that aid and Margaret and her team have had on drought resistant maize are pretty critical as well as enabling people to make a decision to switch to something else when the environment becomes too stressed so I think some of the work we've been doing on introducing highly salt resistant strains of quinoa which has a twice the protein content is rice uh into Vietnam um is right kind of in a track that is in line with that and Peter you asked whether water smart agriculture is a replica model I think the answer is it's not really a model we're just following the track that has been successful in the past and I would sort of summarize it as create a safe space uh increase discussion between the actors both on the water and the agriculture side uh frame the problem um bill consensus and bill consensus on and agree uh principles and then finally what we're trying to do of course is to attract investment by government uh private sector and not lease the farmers themselves because you have managed to convince people that what is proposed leads to water savings and uh increased uh productivity thank you so much so we really just as you go to lunch thinking about knowledge transfer how to improve water savings through new and old technologies and solutions um improving cross-sector knowledge and to Peter's point getting out of your comfort zone so you have deep technical sectoral knowledge but you can come back and look across sectors as you think about solutions to the the challenges ahead you have an incredible wealth and depth of expertise here on the panel thank you so much for spending time with us today um I think lunch is outside and we have until 1245 for lunch but let's thank our panel thank you very much