Water is the next climate story

For most of my career, the climate conversation has been a carbon conversation. We learned to count tons, to price them, to build whole markets around a single molecule. That work mattered, and I don't want to diminish it. But I've come to think we measured the sky so intently that we stopped looking at the ground — and the ground is where most people will actually feel this century's environmental crisis, in the most ordinary form there is: whether or not there is water in the tap.

Carbon is global and abstract. Water is local and immediate. A city doesn't experience a warming planet as a number; it experiences it as a reservoir dropping, a glacier that no longer feeds the dry season, a well that has to be dug deeper than it was a decade ago. I think the next wave of serious environmental investment will follow that experience — away from the atmosphere and toward the watershed.

We measured the sky and forgot the catchment

Freshwater is a strange kind of scarcity. There is no substitute for it, no efficiency that makes a city need less of it to stay alive, and no global market that lets a thirsty region simply buy more. Its security is decided upstream — in the forests, soils, and high-altitude ecosystems that capture rain, slow its release, and meter it out through the dry months. Damage those systems and you don't get a gradual decline; you get flood in one season and drought in the next, which is the worst of both worlds for anyone trying to live or grow food below them.

What strikes me is how little of our climate capital has gone to protecting that machinery. We have funded the measurement of carbon far more readily than the restoration of the systems that hold water in place — even though, for a great many communities, the second is the more direct threat to their survival.

Restoration happens at the source

The most encouraging work I know in this space starts at the top of the watershed, not the bottom. Through my advisory work with Global Forest Generation, I've watched Acción Andina — the largest Indigenous-led effort to restore the high Andean forests — put this idea into practice across the mountains that secure freshwater for hundreds of cities. These native forests are, in effect, the water infrastructure of the Andes: they catch the rain and release it slowly downstream. Restoring them is cheaper and more durable than any concrete substitute, and it is done by the communities who live there and have the most reason to keep it standing.

That last point is the one outsiders miss. Restoration at the source isn't an engineering project you can parachute in. It depends on the people who hold the land — their knowledge, their labor, their stake in the outcome. The forest that secures a distant city's water also sustains a local economy and a culture, and the work only lasts when all three are served at once. Treating it as a single-purpose carbon project, or a single-purpose water project, is how good efforts quietly fail.

Who pays for water?

Here is where my own field has to be honest. Watershed restoration sits awkwardly across every funding box we've built. It's too long-horizon for most investors, too infrastructural to feel like classic philanthropy, and too entangled with community and culture to fit a tidy conservation grant. So it falls into the gap between them — exactly the gap I started this firm to work in.

The answer, as it so often is, is to braid the capital rather than wait for one source to do it all. Philanthropy takes the first risk and funds the early, unprovable years. A nonprofit holds the community trust that no outside party can buy. And as markets for water security and ecosystem services mature, commercial capital can carry the work to a scale that grants never could. None of these is sufficient alone. Put them together, in the right order, and a watershed becomes something you can actually finance.

The opportunity

I don't think water replaces carbon as the story; I think it completes it. The atmosphere taught us that environmental systems are connected and that the damage compounds. Water is where that lesson arrives at the doorstep — measurable, local, and impossible to ignore once the reservoir is low.

For funders and founders willing to look upstream, the opportunity is unusually clear. The systems that secure freshwater are identifiable, restorable, and badly underfunded relative to what they protect. If you have a project sitting somewhere in that landscape — and you're not sure whether it's conservation, infrastructure, or a business — my experience is that the uncertainty itself is usually the sign that it's worth a conversation.