 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the News Museum in Washington, D.C. My name is Dominic Waray, I'm a senior director at the World Economic Forum, and we're here this morning to talk for the next hour about an incredibly complicated but potentially challenging issue to our global economy, and particularly growth, and particularly growth for emerging markets, which are facing a stress of environmental nature, which perhaps hasn't received as much thought or discussion as others in recent times, and that is water, water security. You'll have received a packet of information, which will contain a book, which looks like this, which is a publication we're delighted to be launching here in the United States through this meeting this morning, which is a unique publication that brings together expertise and insight from across the academic, business, NGO, and other thought leader communities, including religious leaders, social entrepreneurs and others, all of whom are experiencing in one way or another a sense of urgency about how we sustain our economic growth in the face of a water security challenge, which links together our desire to increase agricultural productivity, to meet increasing energy demands, to deal with urbanization, industrialization, and sustain and manage our environment. I'm delighted to offer you an incredible range of insights from the panel that we have this morning. I shall introduce them in a second. How we will run this conversation is that we'll hear from each panelist for about three to five minutes on various aspects of this topic, and then we'll take a couple of questions from the floor. So, alongside me this morning for this panel, I'm delighted to welcome Peter Brabeck Lemap, who is the Chairman of the Board of Nestle, a Foundation Board member of the World Economic Forum and Chairman of the Water Resources Group, of which you'll hear more soon. Also, Samantha Gross, who's the Director at IHS Sierra, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, who contributed extensively on the energy part of this conversation. Also alongside me is Abmanulal, who's the Alan and Carol Silverstein Professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University, who has taken an extensive look at water security in the context of climatic variability. Usha Rao Manari, who's the Global Head of Water at the Global Infrastructure and Natural Resource Department at the International Finance Corporation, and the IFC are taking a lead role as one of the MDBs within the MDB family to look particularly at this interlinked issue and particularly at that public-private interface on water. And Jeff Sebrite, Vice President for Environment and Water Resources at the Coca-Cola Company, one of a number of our industry colleagues who are helping the World Economic Forum and its broader collaboration on the water space. There are a number of others in our consortium who are working on this and I'm delighted to welcome our colleague from PepsiCo, Elizabeth, who is in the front row and no doubt we'll be able to answer questions from that dimension as well and to illustrate the breadth of collaboration that we have on this topic. So without any further ado, let me kind of engage the panel in the discussion for you about why this topic of water security and particularly this linkage point between water, food, energy seems to be so important and so important to companies as well as institutions as well as academics. If I could start with you, Mr. Brabeck, why is this topic such an important issue for you? Well, good morning everybody here. Let me first start my perspective as a German of Nestle because that's at least where my journey started in this. When we were celebrating the 140th anniversary of our company, I was seriously thinking about what was the most important factor that would be necessary to celebrate another 140th, so a 280th one. And after going through all the details, finally I came down to one thing which was water because without water, soon one realized there wouldn't be consumers. Without consumers, there's no business. First thing, there wouldn't be life. There wouldn't be sufficient raw materials. Agricultural production needs water. One liter of water for one calorie, if the calorie comes from the plant, 10 liters of water for one calorie if the calorie comes from meat. That's a very important figure because you will see how it impacts afterwards and the water demand curve. Without water, we wouldn't be able to produce because we need water also in the dousal process. And without water, the consumers wouldn't be able to really prepare our products because most of our products are dehydrated and afterwards need water in order to reconstitute. And finally, we are also the biggest bottle water company of the world. So also from their side we need water. So it crystallized down. Water was the most important single aspect in order to assure the sustainability of our business in the long term. That's the way how I came to the same. The next step was well afterwards to have a look and to see what is the water situation in this world. Is this anything that would be challenging? And there I must say to my big surprise I found out a very critical situation which induced me to talk in Davos about five years ago in a room there were fewer people than we had here. I think 10 people in the room talking about the water crisis in the world and everybody was a little bit surprised. And out of this conversation we started to look and make an analysis what's the real situation. And the more we looked into this and where we also talked with our peers, with our friends from Coca-Cola, from Pepsi-Cola, from Submila, from many other of our companies and we suddenly started to share the same idea that we need water and this becomes extremely important for the sustainability aspect and we decided to come together and to create a group in order to get more information about it. In parallel the World Economic Forum at the Global Agenda Council established on water where members from academia, members from the NGOs, members also from private companies were working more in details and more scientifically about the water situation. The outcome was that finally we created this water resource group and we asked on the one hand IFC here, on the other hand McKinsey to help us to make a serious undertaking on this water situation. And what we found out was very simple that water is on the one hand a global issue but it can only be looked at on the local base. Local means not national base because it has to do with water basins and water basins in many times are shared with different nations so it's regional, local in this sense it doesn't mean national. And we analyzed 154 water basins over the world and we established during this analysis that already today, as of today, we have an over exploitation of water resources which is 300 cubic kilometers of water. Let me just put this into framework. We need about 4200 cubic kilometers of water for the human consumption. We have 4200 kilometers of water which we need for the environment extremely important to keep the environment going. We are already today overusing 300 kilometers. Now who is paying the 300 cubic kilometers? It's environment and that's the reason why you see the Hoover M getting less and less water. That's the reason why you see the Aral Lake having diminished 75 percent in 25 years. I mean cities that were hard by 25 years ago are now 100 kilometers away from the lake. Do you see that the five biggest rivers don't bring water anymore during months to the sea? The deltas are drying out. So our over usage of today is being paid by the environment. That's why we still have water but we are using water which is not replenishable. Now when we looked forward into the year 2030 we established that we will have a water gap of about 40 percent and this 40 percent water gap without any other parameter changing would mean that we have a 30 percent grain production in the world in danger. So this problem is becoming a food security problem very clearly. Now this is under actual circumstances. If now you add to this two facts. First the further increasing population grows and we know that now since a week ago we know that we are not going to stop at 9 billion we are now most probably going to stop at 10 billion which is another billion more which means that every second we have three people more to feed and every second we have 0.2 hectare of land less due to erosion and urbanization you can already feel the pressure which is coming there plus on top of it a new political aspect which is a biofuel which just to give you an idea it needs 4600 liter of water to produce one liter of bioethanol it takes 9100 liter of water to produce one liter of biodiesel. Now this comes on top of all of this very clearly we are in the middle of a major major water crisis already today and this finally brought us in to introduce and create a new institution which is the World Economic Forum Water Resource Group which has been established in 2010 and which is now working with several governments in the world in order to find solutions to implement solutions that we have already elaborated and those governments we are working we have been signing up with is basically Jordania Mexico India and just two weeks ago we signed with South Africa and next week or next week after we're going to Mongolia and sign with them so that's more or less where we are and this is a perspective that we as a food company and why we are so much interested in food. Thank you very much Peter for particularly providing that overview of why a food company of such proportion is engaging so incredibly in this discussion. Now from food and you touched upon it briefly to energy and I'm delighted to welcome Samantha Grosz the director of IHS CERA and IHS CERA contributed to the book on the energy play and this water energy nexus is becoming quite a key discussion area as we have seen in the water food water agricultural nexus and it's great so I wonder if you can give us some insights into this dimension of the nexus challenge. Absolutely thank you very much Dominic I'd just like to start by extending a warm thank you to the World Economic Forum for bringing much needed attention to the interconnected nature of water challenges. I'd also like to say a quick thanks to all of you for being here to think about this important issue Thursday in the morning on Friday. So I'm here to discuss the energy portion of this report both what the energy water nexus is and some principles on how to thinking about it particularly when making decisions about future energy systems. The so-called energy water nexus really flows in two directions water is a critical input to the production of nearly all forms of energy and on the other hand energy is a critical input to the provision of water and the treatment of wastewater. On the energy side the energy sector and policymakers are really used to thinking about energy supply along three axes the first of those is energy security the second is environmentally friendly energy or low carbon energy and the third is low prices or the economics of that energy supply. When you add the additional parameter of conserving and protecting water resources you make the challenge of providing energy to a growing and more prosperous world even greater. Adding this additional parameter sort of changes the way you think about certain things he alluded to biofuels which can be very water intensive there's also the issue of concentrating solar power we've heard about that a bit in the southeast here in the United States or the southwest I'm sorry in the United States. On the water supply side water supply in many parts of the world is becoming steadily more energy intensive particularly in rapidly growing areas one example pumping water long distances and over mountains to southern California here in the United States uses eight percent of total California electricity supply even larger such projects are under consideration in China and in other parts of the world with real implications for energy demand in the Middle East desalination allows us to almost literally turn oil and natural gas into fresh water but this is a tremendously energy intensive process given these interconnections between energy and water what are some principles that um thought leaders policymakers should apply when thinking about the energy water nexus the first principle is that water and energy issues cannot be viewed in isolation considering the interplay between the two can help avoid unintended consequences of energy policies or of water policies second and we've alluded to this earlier all water issues are local Dominique and I joked a bit before the um before this session that the more times we said the world local up here perhaps the better this presentation would be the value of water and the availability of water it differs tremendously in different places around the world and in this way thinking about water challenges is very different than thinking about climate change challenges since co2 emitted somewhere in the world is the same as co2 emitted anywhere in the world water challenges are just the opposite so these principles lead us to the conclusion that there's really no one size fits all solutions to water and energy issues or extending that really any water issue the world needs local solutions to local challenges and multidisciplinary approaches water touches every part of our economy and ecology and we lose sight of this fact at our peril thank you very much um this uh um water energy interplay is it's a really fascinating frontier that that's opening up and my understanding is that um by 2030 there's gonna be a 40 increase in demand for energy or thereabouts in the US and at the moment in in this country um close to 50 percent of all freshwater withdrawals are for energy um so if you think about some parts of the country how are those two things gonna square and does a energy policy effectively become a water policy when you have governments which are quite organized in sort of verticals as opposed to cross cutting bureaucracies i think those are the kinds of challenges on the government side and then a range of technology issues so i commend um the work that i just did in this this book you'll find all kinds of facts and figures um about the water energy interface in there now just to make your morning even more complicated let's add another layer um and let's go to um professor um at manu lao and maybe you can um draw us into this um rather complex interface of the food energy water play um in the context of perhaps climatic variability and and those sorts of issues professor thanks dominique uh i i think i want to preface my remarks by saying that humans have human societies have always existed at the fringe of sustainability uh people have found ways to exploit the resources locally available to them to the utmost extent before they move on the problem we face today is that we've reached the limit of where we can move to and that's really what's driving the climate change issue since that's a well-publicized issue i don't think i'll spend a whole lot of time on that but move quickly into the climate variability aspect which has been with us forever you know if if you are biblical you have the seven years of famine and seven years of plenty kind of story and the modern context of this is rather interesting what we see is that there are many places in the world where now groundwater is being depleted at high rates this could be the central value of california the midwestern united states north china north india and so on the question is is this depletion happening because people are overusing a particular resource or is it related in fact to climate variability and the number i would throw at you in that context with regard to food is the following the productivity of irrigated agriculture where you can reliably supply water is three to five times the productivity of the same crop with the same application of other inputs under rain fed conditions the salient difference here is the variability in rainfall and what drives that particular yield from that point of view so what has happened in the last 20 years is worldwide there's been an explosion in groundwater use because surface water storage systems have not been working very well this comes with a dramatic increase in energy usage for agriculture driven by the water usage in agriculture politicians have subsidized this which means that effectively there's not a cap on this particular story that would come normally and it's you know really driven by the climate variability aspect of this in countries such as india and north china and northeast brazil for example or california the range between the average and the minimum amount of water available over a period of a decade in specific years can be as much as five okay so if you have a way to draw that water you then get somewhere out of it the other side of this story is also interesting probably people have heard about the 116 day flood in the industry were in pakistan last year and the current flooding in the mississippi and the perpetual flooding in southeast china now keep in mind that southeast china also happens to be the global manufacturing hub today and the global shipping hub for manufactured goods so if you go on the other side of the water security issue namely floods the thing that we are getting exposed to by being a globalized society is the vulnerability both on the drought side and on the flood side of all societies globally to manufacturing or agricultural production deficits in a particular place and failures of supply chains to either deliver to that location or to deliver out of that location so comprehensively i think the place where climate change is finally going to have a most serious impact is not going to be because of the increases in temperature but because of the changes in the patterns associated with precipitation and the severity of the nature of floods and droughts that we face and this is something that we've been working on and trying to investigate uh mostly from looking at how we can address water problems more effectively in this context the one thing that has emerged from that is by looking at paleo climate and by historical climate we learn that climate actually is not random depending on where you are in the world there is substantial structure to climate the seven years of famine and plenty kind of repeats with different sort of time cycles for example the el Nino southern oscillation that some people may have become familiar to is a three to seven year phenomena there's a north Atlantic oscillation which is the eight to twelve year phenomena Mongolia was mentioned Mongolia responds very strongly to an Arctic oscillation and last year was you know a time when most of their animals died the sweet the most severe zoo ever they had that they had so those kind of phenomena it turns out that a can be priced into a risk model because these are clustered risk situations and second we have been successful at developing season ahead forecasting capabilities for many places in the world now which then allow changes in both production characteristics insurance pricing models as well as reservoir operation models and pricing structures for groundwater to provide the right incentives so what i'm trying to conclude with is that not only are there risks associated with climate but careful study of the implications for the climate structure globally and locally the places that we work with provides a fantastic opportunity for addressing the supply and the demand side of the water systems at the macro level so that's a bit different message than what you normally hear because people mostly start have started focusing on water security which is exciting and outstanding from my point of view but when you start looking at the solution space you have to look comprehensively and climate plays a very interesting role so i'll stop with those comments thank you very much for that so i did warn you that we'd kind of be layering up the complexity in this in this conversation what i think is is fascinating as we collectively have gone through this debate about the economic system that we find ourselves in is that whilst water is local the system economically that we're in now globally with these supply chains and value chains inherently can create more international ramifications particularly one two or three parts of that supply chain globally in various regions around the world start to suffer from too much or too little water in terms of this climatic variability and that's a slightly different kind of message on this climatic story and i think perhaps has been suggested otherwise as you were intonating which in terms of pragmatic practical solutions to create resilience in the economy i think is something quite tangible to grasp upon as opposed to a general sense of we have this looming crisis and what on earth can we do now against all of this if i could turn to jeff seabright from the coca-cola company wearing perhaps both your hat but also the hat of many more of your companies in the food beverage retail consumer good arena this all sounds terribly complicated why do you feel that many more companies like yourselves and others are becoming quite um focused on this issue what's going on uh well thanks dominique and welcome everybody um i think peter braybeck outlined it in his uh opening remarks uh you know water is really a productive factor or input for business right whether you're in the pharma sector pharmaceuticals or agriculture food and beverage energy chemicals water is a critical resource but there's a growing awareness i think in the business community in part due to the dialogue through the world economic forum but also in other venues really over the last four or so years i would say a growing awareness that this that this critical input which is um you know a key business imperative is a resource a shared resource that's under growing stress around the world and i think we're seeing more and more signs of that and i think businesses are increasingly getting focused on it the ceo water mandate through the un global compact you see more and more businesses reporting on on water related issues uh so i think there's a growing awareness um in the business community certainly for my company coca cola uh you know we are a beverage company so it's it's pretty straightforward you know bp talked about you know beyond petroleum you could perhaps think of that in terms of renewable energy in the future there is no beyond water in our sector and it's a it's a it's a critical critical input we've been reporting it in our sec 10k filings with the us securities exchange commission as a as a strategic risk for since 2003 that the that both quality and quantity of water is is is a is a risk and one that that we need to be addressing um we've actually within coca cola taken a pretty deep look at it we have roughly a thousand franchise bottling plants in about 200 countries so we have a pretty wide spectrum of experience with uh with water and the real learning for us is that whereas in the past we might have looked at water in terms of what we do within the four walls of our our operations in terms of water efficiency very important waste water treatment very important but we really need to look outside the four walls and understand what's going on in the watersheds which are really nature's water factories that are really the first line of our supply chains um around the world and understand the other shared users in those watersheds uh and how we as part of the the solution can work with them to to address some of the challenges uh in in sort of a common common effort um we've set for ourselves a goal by 2020 of giving back as much water as we use in our direct operations so in our bottling operations uh we're about 31 percent of the way there but really means it's sort of offsetting or giving back through supporting projects on reforestation wetlands restoration rainwater harvesting drip irrigation those kinds of things especially obviously in in areas and communities where where water stress is an issue so we're really working hard to approach that the further we've got into it and through the dialogue with the world economic forum I think also we've come to realize that you really can't sort of solve one problem in this space without taking into consideration other aspects and so this water energy food interrelationship uh is really a very important uh issue and and the way I think we envision it is that the the complex you know sort of interdependence of those three key factors is really being stressed by demographic and economic growth which is a good thing but more and more protein more and more people is going to require um you know more and uh and at the same time climate change which Manu talked about and the combination of those stress factors is is really accelerating I think some increased volatility in the relationship between and among those three and really reducing the margin of error um you could argue that those three have existed in relative stability you know within for the last two three generations um arguably we're entering a phase where the the new norm uh is is volatility and and that's going to create some real challenges for business and for government uh to uh to to work together to address these complex challenges for which single variant sort of single solutions are really not going to be viable um so we we believe that business has a role to play in that through um partnership and we're certainly working in partnership with uh with many organizations to uh to try to advance uh water security water resource management market-based solutions and and new business models and policy dialogue which is really at the heart of this water resources group initiative which is to bring together uh business NGOs and and government uh to really focus on how collectively we can work through these complex challenges and make sure that we're um making making the progress we need to make so with that thank you Jeff um what's interesting again I think from the uh that the world forum platform looking at this at this debate has been um you mentioned um collaboration um and uh coalitions in your in your in your overview there uh and the fact that we're dealing with even in a localized situation there's a common property resource of a public good issue whereby even if you do as much as you can within your own um fence sign of operation it doesn't matter if someone else is really kind of disturbing um the water resource base next door and it just in terms of those new frontiers of of collaboration around these common property resource issues I would commend to you um just if you look inside um this book go to about page three and you'll see that um alongside many of the other kind of attributions from well-known academics you have the chairman and CEO of PepsiCo and the chairman and the CEO of the Coca-Cola company side by side each with quotes about that very fundamental nature of collaboration um on this issue set um and uh in the competitive world that we live in um the illustration of kind of collaboration um on those sorts of natures I think is is compelling in itself and I um commend our industry partners who've been working with us on this space now um you mentioned also um um Jeff about this this water resource group and about um some movements toward action I'm delighted to be able to to welcome here um the global head of water Usher Almanari um from International Finance Corporation and I guess there's a couple of things here first of all is what's the private lending arm of the World Bank doing in this space um and we've heard a little bit about this water resources group and and you're taking the lead on this can you tell us some more about it thank you good morning to everybody um let me preface my remarks about why IFC got involved in this with just a simple statement to say what we've heard so far and I was fascinated to hear my my fellow panelists here to talk about the link of water to all these other important challenges that the world or a country is about to face and suddenly I am delighted to see that water and water security is at the nexus of a whole other set of securities food security energy security climate security and something I heard yesterday which we all know about but we don't articulate human health and productivity security which is really really important for countries and policymakers and countries to worry about the book here talks about food water energy and climate and I guess we would add another addition which would include human health and productivity as well because this is really very very important why did we get involved as IFC we're a multilateral part of the World Bank group we frankly have been struggling with the issue of water for years for decades frankly and what we found was at at at one point many of our clients and IFC came to us and said IFC we've never thought of water availability as a business risk today suddenly we are looking at water availability as one of our fundamental businesses you heard that you heard it from Jeff you heard it from Peter and this risk is going to affect not only our operations but we worry about the productivity of the countries in which we are so can you help us connect if you will to policymakers who may or may not be really aware of the gravity of the issue connected to water that's when we got involved and and Dominic has been talking about layering levels of complexity to the issue and the water resources group tried to say okay it is a complex issue it has many dimensions what we should do is try to simplify to really pull it apart and see what is it that is the water issue why is it at the nexus of all the other levels of security and we found three or four things and there may be other things but these were the first three or four things that we found and we found this as a group called the water resources group which I will come to in a second but three or four things we found was that solutions to water security can only occur when there's an explicit collaboration between stakeholders in the water sector that is public private and civil society if they don't all talk to each other and they don't stop operating within silos solutions and sustainable solutions will not come about second as everybody was saying it's important to look at water holistically in all its uses why because otherwise what has happened so far there has been an overuse complete and dramatic over use of water in almost every country in the world resulting in a dangerous decline in water sources we're working in karnataka which i'll tell you in a second there's been there have been falls of 500 to a thousand meters in water tables in the state of karnataka farmers are saying we don't have any water for the food that we have to grow there is a reliance on non-renewable aquifers in jordan which is another serious issue which is not just jordan but that whole region is worrying about how to secure water for their children for the future of the country so a holistic or integrated look of water is important third we also found that there was really a paucity of facts and numbers and baselines if you will in the water sector in the countries where we're working people were relying on numbers that were outdated perhaps not reflecting reality today and so it became really important to create these fact bases and using those fact bases to create a diagnostic which analyze the fact bases simply and and and importantly so that everybody who looked at the issue and the solutions could understand it and and finally we found that water as many of my colleagues have said is a very local issue it is the trouble with being a local issue is that it was never very high on the political agenda of a country ever and so what we also said was in order to bring light to water it should move up the political agenda and become a number one issue and the way that has happened really nearly if i may say is through looking at it through the other filters of food energy climate etc security so we then sat down with a few of our partners some of whom are represented on this table and said we should first come up with at least an initial thinking right on the issue of water security and in November of 2009 we launched this report called charting our water future which some of you may have seen already and since then till today we decided with our partners in the world economic forum and our private sector partners to actually use the diagnostic and the analytical approach that we came up with in that report to see if it can be applied to countries i mean one thing is coming up with the report great right but it has to be actionable and has to be implementable and so we've been working as peter said in india state of karnataka jordan uh and mexico mexico particularly was what ukman was talking about the whole climate variability issue of water security and now we're moving into a few other countries in doing this we found that indeed there was great relevance to the to our approach policymakers were very interested in it why because they said this is a very simple way of pulling apart the rather complex and myriad issues that water has given us so far we haven't been able to move forward in it because we don't really understand what it is and we haven't had the backing of other partners and stakeholders to actually push through reform change and other things that we'd like to do so the water resources group has been working in these countries it is a it is a true neutral public private platform consisting of multilaterals like ourselves i've seen private sector companies like nesley and coke cola and then the world economic forum and we're working with civil society organizations that are giving us this holistic look at what could be potential solutions in the water sector as as has been remarked we're working in three countries we have three other countries two to three other countries and if you will a pipeline and what we're doing here is not only to create information on the ground but to use that information then to create a catalog or a knowledge base of best practice and lessons learned success doesn't just come from everything good that has been done it also comes from what you shouldn't do so we're trying to put together this kind of catalog at at the level of the water resources group and i guess it was in january we took the decision as a group of partners to formalize the water resources group so far we've been a group of informal well-intentioned sort of entities that have come together to look at this issue differently so we're now constituting the water resources group as a formal entity it will be housed in the i of c at least for the foreseeable future it will it will however continue to be what has made it successful so far which is a neutral collaborative platform between the public private sectors and civil society i'll stop there don't make i hope that was all right thank you very much for that so there we have it you've had a number of different dimensions from a number of different stakeholders representing this issue we've got time i've got about 18 minutes or so and to take a couple of questions so i'd be delighted to take a few and then we'll kind of take one mass to the panel if you could say who you are and what you represent and professionally then we'll know where you're coming from in terms of your perspective sir i'm i'm jacob share and i'm director of global strategy and advocacy for the natural resources defense council a little more from a year a year from now the leadership of the planet is going to come back to rio for the un conference on sustainable development will be the 20th anniversary of the first or summit and i'd be interested in hearing from the panelists you know sort of what you'd like to see happen at rio or in the months running up to rio where we could see real action on the part of of countries corporations and indeed communities to address the the water security issue which you've also articulately uh i have talked about this morning thank you took a couple more for this first round hi good morning i'm tiffany stuck around with climate wire i was wondering if you could comment on this idea of the water footprint and how accurate it is and how um how it's been used in corporate settings especially from mr c brighton mr ravec one more hi i'm joe white with the wall street channel um i'd like to hear from the representatives from the two big food companies what kind of government regulation they're willing to accept in the area of water i happen to know that nesli has fought in michigan efforts to control their withdrawals of water um so i'm interested as they go forward what kind of regulatory scheme they'd be willing to support great thanks let's um address those three and then we'll take uh take a few more so we have rio plus 20 we have the water footprint and we have um uh discussions on regulation and policy um perhaps if um maybe um monday you could pick up on the rio plus 20 piece i would be happy to um one of the things usha said you know really resonates with me and uh the way i would phrase it is that with the climate change debate what happened was that a bunch of scientists caught together came up with scenarios and then they went to a policy debate what's been happening with water is that there's a large amount of noise in the political arena and we do not have solid information to work from one of the reasons we don't have solid information is because the data collected relative to water are spotty but worse each government feels that this is a gold mine that should not be revealed to anybody else and unless we can get transparency on those things it'll be very difficult there are many things that we can collect information on on today's status but with the fact that there's been tremendous variability in the way water has been used and what has been available in the past and climate we need timelines so that we can put these things in perspective and then resolve large-scale disputes about who gets what and what kind of allocations are actually feasible for people so uh i would really like to implore that something like that comes through the second piece that i think has to be done with that is that once that sort of information is made at least more transparent than it is today there should be comprehensive planning efforts which look at both the current state of technology to be deployed in this but also novel technologies that are coming up for example for solar thermal based water disinfection and treatment and for possibly growing food in non-land based and non-traditional settings these are things that will be solutions needed when we hit the 10 billion platform for people but we need to start working on those simultaneously to today's issues you're looking for quite substantive kind of pragmatic technological kind of conversations around the rear plus 20 on behalf of the mdb community and i've seen particular issue what's what's your um desire for um an advancement in the conversation around a rear plus 20 agenda so i have i have one actually and from it's from what i said as an mdb what we have failed to do is to bring all the voices that are worried about the sector together around the same table to talk about the issues and come up with solutions so what i would like to have is for public private and civil society to sit together and talk honestly and without positions on what the solutions could be thank you um the water footprint issue was raised now it's something that um your organization has worked with others on um jeff so i wonder if you can offer some some thoughts on that yeah no certainly um well it's uh you know it's an important area because you if to understand our impact and how we can sort of effect change we need to understand what that footprint is and we've taken a look at a whole range of our products i'll just give you um you know some examples a we looked and it's very local let me let me begin by saying that we said local eight times now up here it really depends on on the local um um operation so uh a 500 milliliter coca-cola from the dongen boiling plant in the netherlands has about 70 liter of 35 liters of water associated with that 500 milliliter package that's based on work that we've done in conjunction with the university of tventa in the netherlands um and uh you know if there were a different configuration it might be a different number slightly the vast majority of the water footprint comes from the agricultural inputs that the in this case the beet sugar uh used for the the sweetener in that beverage um a liter of simply orange orange juice 300 to 400 liters of water to 99 percent of that is in the growing and it depends a lot on whether it's brazil or florida because there are different rain fed you know aspects to that so it's all very very very local um it ends up um you know really requiring a a a very local frame so i hope that that answers the the question what strikes me about the uh the water footprint debate is that although people will tend to focus on the number at the end of the of the of the machine if you like actually it perhaps helps identify across the value chain um where we're absolutely and and as a result so you know the amount of water that we require to actually produce the product in the operation the the the actual bottling operation or processing in the case of food and beverage more broadly is quite small um from from an energy perspective um and Samantha is that um value in the water footprint um discussion from as you can see it yes there's definitely value in the footprinting discussion but it's really only an important first step to understanding the water equation and energy it's not just how much water goes into each product at various points in the value chain it's where that water comes from and the quality of that water so footprints are crucial but they're just a first step to understanding the interplay between energy or food and agriculture and water resources no pun intended about footprints being just the first step let me just add that i mean when we do this we we look in terms of three different aspects blue water green water and gray water so you know really understanding and for those of you who are now confused about there's different types of water i'm sure there'll be um clarity at the end and to our question from um the colleague from the wall street journal um mr bob if i can turn to to you about this issue of um interfacing on the regulatory side which is always a an interesting area that's a very interesting area because i think the mineral water industry is perhaps the longest regulated industry that there is and rightly by the way so it really all starts when you go back 120 years ago 150 years ago to when people went uh to the places like san peligrino places like the telo avion in order to go for the functional quality of the water which was considered to be good for your health it was the first functional food that existed doctors were sending you for two weeks to go to be tell the contracts in order to go for a cure what happened then is that the people said first of all it's very expensive to go and secondly i want to have this product for the rest of my life also so why cannot i buy the the product and take it home that's the way how the mineral water industry started to exist and immediately came regulation and the regulation sense uh and european one at least that if you want to sell the water of a mineral source you have to bottle this product at the source and secondly you cannot bottle in a container bigger than 1.5 litre third for the bottle you have to assure that the environmental quality of the surrounding of the source is absolutely being given and third regulation is the sustainability you are not allowed to take more water out that what can be naturally replenished so this is a regulation it's about 100 years old and i think it's a very good one and i'm absolutely in favor of such a regulation because i think it assures exactly what we want to have which is a long-term sustainable source of very good healthy water so yes we are very much in favor of government regulation in this area thank you um further questions from the audience and sir serri taminen with seven generation advisors of former secretary of the california environmental protection agency so i have some knowledge of water issues in the west and we work now with uh more than 400 sub-national governments around the world states and provinces on climate change issues and actually just launched something in cooperation with the un called the r20 that is is dedicated to getting these sub-national governments working together i wanted to ask uh with your water resources group uh what is the thought about working with national governments when we just heard the term local i think jeff it's gone beyond eight i think it's about 16 or 20 by now but you know this is the same problem obviously the un f triple c is facing with working only with national governments when these problems are very local so so what is the the plan for getting down to that local level and uh and perhaps uh what where do you see the the solutions are those also just local thank you that's a good good question any others and sir eric rozenberg with old elite um my question is um peter bravick said that uh we're in a crisis situation right now on this issue and yet we also hear that not much is being done at a governmental level what does your research research say would happen if nothing gets done if we still keep picking a can you're talking mass famine migration changes etc can you walk us through what your research says okay so um let's just take those two and perhaps we'll start with the latter one so we don't end on a kind of note of doom and gloom um um but um in in terms of how just maybe just kind of ask a sweep across the um the the panel in this in terms of if um business as usual were to pervade from where uh you collectively sit what can you um sense might happen um peter how to start with you well i mean the study which was done in 2003 and at the condition of 2003 and i mentioned before that this condition has unfortunately worsened because of this biofuel thing at that time it was very clear that if we continue like this we will have a 30 percent shortage on grain production that's a risk that we have today as of today now add to this now the whole question of biofuel and i just want to point this out once more you have to understand when we talk about biofuel that both agriculture are producing energy for the human consumption in calorie we need 2600 2800 calories per day as also energy for the fuel side the difference is that the fuel market is 20 times bigger in energy in calorie than the and then the human kind okay so when politicians are telling us that they want up to 20 percent of the energy side being replaced by biofuels what they are telling is that you have to triple triple the food production this is the consequences in if you want i mean any any second class pupil can do that okay if you want to replace 20 percent of a 20 times bigger market with a small what what is the constant sudden three times more okay so this was the reason why food prices exploded in 2008 very clearly people are saying today governments are saying well we have speculation well if you if you offer such a such a perspective i don't think it's speculation it's very clear what happens prices will go up okay so this is the fundamental thing which we have to tackle once and for all otherwise we will have a problem on food production very very shortly thank you i'm going to come to you at the end for this ask about the wrg and national versus subnational but i'd just like to kind of go through our panel briefly on you know what might happen if i just you just hold that thought because i think actually i'd quite like to hear from our colleagues from iHS seara not necessarily just on that kind of biofield comment but business as usual in the energy space and water what's your viewpoint that's no problem thank you you know i'm very fond of an expression i can't remember which economist originally said this but things that can't go on won't and i see that with respect to several issues in the energy sector what i see happening is that the energy sector is not going to be in front of the line for water resources um human uses agricultural uses will always will always win out you'll certainly you can certainly see efficiencies in these sectors particularly agriculture but i think the energy sector understands and perhaps needs to understand a bit more that um it's not first in line and that it will need to work on its water footprint across across uh technologies so i think the sector is well aware that it's not in front of the line and um as time goes by we'll get better and better at um sort of finding technologies that that work with whatever conditions were presented with thank you this will have to leave us for another appointment but we'll just kind of um uh to close through on this so um jeff if nothing changes what in your viewpoint will be the consequence well i i think one of the important sort of findings in this water resources group work was a very careful assessment of supply demand both current and projected to 2030 and what was um found was that there is a 40 projected gap between supply and demand by 2030 under a business as usual scenario how that will get manifest given the interrelated nature of water in the in the different ways in which it it it moves and and and is used uh remains to be seen but what it portends is tremendous stress stress in agriculture stress in in allocation for energy i mean during the drought in the southeast i live in atlanta several years ago there were several power plants in the southeast that that uh came close to having to shut down because there wasn't enough water inflow in rivers to cool the thermoelectric power plants as common south africa has faced similar kinds of things you can well imagine the impacts on agriculture as well so tremendous economic impacts tremendous human impacts in emerging markets where the ability to adapt to some of these changes is much less in evidence and i think as we look over the next 30 years climate adaptation climate impacts are being manifest and will increasingly be manifest through the water cycle because water is the is the is the the earth's regulator and so whether that's glacial melt or increased droughts or increased severity of whether uh it's going to have i think some significant impacts and we're going to need much greater resilience to work through that thank you um briefly professor now if we don't do anything where might we end up i'm not as pessimistic and i'll explain why uh agriculture is the dominant water user 70 worldwide uh efficiency of water use in agriculture is 10 to 15 percent so there's a huge opportunity there to actually do something but the question is if you don't do something what happens so i think the impact is economic and since the economic impact is primarily economic things will happen because those things do have a way of correcting themselves i'll start with an example very quickly in india what we see is that in the state of panjab which grows most of the food ground water levels have been dropping the energy cost associated with this is borne by the state that's 40 to 60 percent of all electricity used in the state goes for ground water pumping the state is now bankrupt they are desperately trying to figure out what to do about it so that's you know a pressure point associated with it our simulations of what you could do in india with regard to agriculture show that by simply changing where what is grown in the country you meet food self-sufficiency requirements you increase net income and you eliminate ground water usage on average okay so when you without increasing efficiency of use you know simply by changing where what is grown so i so what is starting to happen in india as a result of you know these kind of discussions is they are saying we have to switch where we procure specific grains from so in effect what i think will happen in the in is that there will be economic pain on the way there's no doubt about that because if you want to increase efficiency of what you use you're going to have to spend money for that and that has to come out of somewhere but if you trade that against 40 to 60 percent of total electricity used being subsidized on an annual basis that's not a big deal at all so i think we will get through this uh with some pain pain ahead but opportunity for innovation from the sound of it and now just to to close us out if i may usher and this question of them the water resources group moving forward and local versus national what's your viewpoint on that to the gentleman's question thank you for your question it was it was an excellent one i think compared to other issues such as energy or even food security um water has always been a local issue the trouble however has been so we've been so low it's not only being looked at at the subnational government level but really a local municipal level if you look at countries really down at the local mayor level even well-intention mayors however our research found as water resources group didn't have the means and the support to carry out solutions because of a few things which i mentioned they didn't have the facts before them they didn't have the stakeholder base backing them in their decisions and most of all they didn't have if you will a national agenda support from high level country level decision makers saying okay you can do this and we will support you in doing this so what we found is that on the one hand the solutions have to be quite local because it is a local challenge i mean it depends on your your river basin or your water basin or whatever it is but it cannot happen in isolation of anything else that's happening in the country and two it cannot happen in isolation of all of one use it has to be integrated between all uses so we found that our research said create a framework which is national in nature why because this country is connected to a global ecosystem and water's becoming even a global issue now so create a framework at the national level but do the implementation or actioning of that framework and off that action plan at the local level so i i mean i think we're running out of time but that's kind of where our research is i'm happy to spend a few moments absolutely great thank you and i just um thank you for for listening to that overview i do commend this as um excellent bedtime reading um for you and um we'll be following up with questions um quite carefully um just for your interest all the contributors who were in this book and as many who obviously weren't um able to fit on this panel um are available through the networks of the forum if one wants to follow up um bilaterally the questions or comment um through uh facebook or other kind of virtual means or indeed through um and the connections that we have i'm sure that those who shared some time with us on this panel will also be delighted to take questions now or in the future if you if you make the connect um i just like to say that this is a program that is ongoing as you've heard so really this is a live text um shortly it'll be placed on a forum website so available for all to um um comment on and add to um and uh we hope to come back in a few years time with um some more details on these uh case studies of where we're getting to on this debate to answer the question of you know what's the journey going to look like thank you all very much for your attention and time very much appreciated and thank you panel