In the latest BlueTech thought-leadership interview, founder and chief executive Paul O’Callaghan speaks to Giulio Boccaletti, author of Water: A Biography.
Giulio is a scientist who has worked on climate dynamics and physical oceanography at Princeton University, where he is also a NASA earth system science fellow. More recently Giulio has worked for global consultancy McKinsey & Company, leading its sustainability and resource productivity practice, whilst also co-founding their water practice.
Here is the full transcript of the fascinating interview:
Paul O’Callaghan: Giulio, it’s a pleasure to be speaking with you today. You’ve written a very important book, the biography that needed to be written – a biography of water. Before we dive into that, you were involved in probably the most seminal report that was ever written on water. It was called Charting our Water Future. I’d love to hear what your perspective is now because it was published in 2009. What do you feel about that body of work now?
Giulio Boccaletti: It’s a good place to start. It was seminal in the sense that it was the first very high-profile attempt at bringing water out of the technical and into the managerial and political. It wasn’t necessarily seminal from a purely technical perspective, but it certainly was important in communicating in a novel way, the problems that the water community always knew it faced to an audience that normally doesn’t think about this. It was an interesting experience, born out of, kind of the frustration with the fact that in the early 2000s people started sort of catching onto the problem of carbon mitigation.
I had been a climate scientist for a decade before going into business. I knew that the flipside of that coin was going to be climate adaptation but I couldn’t get businesses or governments when I was in McKinsey to engage with this question of how do we prepare for a changing climate? And then suddenly I hit on this realization that if you translate climate issues in water terms, suddenly it becomes very tangible to people and you can engage. I found that in the mid to late 2000s businesses were really starting to ask questions about water and water issues. People were starting to talk about it. In fact, World Economic Forum had had a big agenda council focused on water, which had tried to wrap its arms around how to articulate the problem of water.
I came in with the team that I was leading at the time and, and simply articulated the problem in terms that were understandable to CEOs and ministers of France. And the problem was articulated as a gap between, demand, future demand and the current ability to provide for it and relayed this 40% gap between the two – in a future demand and the, and the supply by 2030, and then illustrated through the use of a marginal cost curve, all the solutions that could be brought to solve that gap, how do we fill the gap? You know, what is it? And the big insights were that in fact supply infrastructure was probably the minority of the answer and that the cheapest and most effective way of solving that major gap was to essentially increase the productivity of water use across the economy, you know, through agricultural productivity improvements and the like.
We laid out a roadmap, which was both global and local in nature, and went all the way down to the watershed, of the full suite of solutions that you could bring to bear, to solve the fundamental water crisis, which is how to make sure that the economy has enough water of the right quality and quantity to achieve everything it wants to achieve. How do I feel it’s now been over 10 years since that report came out? It’s a very mixed bag, right? Because on the one hand, I think it succeeded in framing the problem in a way that has persisted a few years later, the UN announced that there was a gap, a 40% gap between supply and demand, and if you trace the sort of references all the way back, you come back to that report.
So in terms of framing the narrative and the story, I think it was quite successful. And I think it was successful in alerting all industrial sectors that they all had a role to play in this problem. This wasn’t just an issue that the water utilities could solve, or the water tech, it’s actually across the entire economy, but in the end you could ask, well, has the gap gotten smaller? The truth is that there’s been very marginal improvements in the management of water, I would say. At the margins, there have been some improvements. For example, I remember a few years ago, a colleague of mine at the World Economic Forum told me that South Africa, which is one of our case studies had in fact closed that gap, you know, by about three, 4%.
But there again, South Africa had the day zero crisis in Cape Town during that time. So in a way, the realization of that experience is what brought me to write this book. What I realized was the problem wasn’t facts, right, was the design of the institutions that are meant to take those facts and then translate into action. The problem it wasn’t only revealing a map, a chart to the future, but was figuring out who does what, when and with what resources in order to make it happen? And that turns out to be a much more complicated and in a way historically latent issue. And that was the starting point actually for thinking about this book.
PO: Even 10 years on, if I want to look at something that looks at it at a global level, it’s very hard to tackle that issue. So any attempt to do so now actually is open to people saying, well, you could have looked at this or you could have looked at that, but nevertheless it did explain in very simple terms, a supply demand gap. Also what jumped out to me, some of these solutions were cost neutral. When you improve irrigation efficiency, it it’s really kind of a no regrets scenario. You make a big impact for, for a relatively modest and sometimes net positive investment when you look at the ROI on it.
GB: That’s right. Now the interesting thing is then, you know, because what happened after the report is that I started working in countries, including India. and what you quickly realized is that institutional architecture in delivering those solutions matters a great deal. So for example, it is true that from beginning to end investments in agricultural productivity are net zero, even maybe NPV positive, they may actually create value with respect to the use of water. But the problem is that the capital owners, the operators on the landscape and the people that ultimately set the prices are not the same people. And so that value may not actually get allocated to the right places. And so there’s no incentive for the investor to put the money because they don’t actually have access to the benefits. And I think those insights are still true, but they also, when you try to apply them, they then reveal that, managing water is a matter of institutional architecture.
PO: I think that’s probably what we all realize when we’re in our silos. We think our silo has a great solution, but it’s disconnected from other areas of opportunity, which is why things like microfinance are really interesting. But you had one other little important part of your biography on your way to writing the book was you produced a water documentary – H2O the Molecule that Made Us.
Tell me a little bit about what drove you to do that?
GB: When I left McKinsey, several years after I published that report, I had come to the conclusion that part of the battle we have to fight was a storytelling battle. The issue was action and getting institutions to mobilize and by institutions, I mean local communities, not just banks, right?
Institutions at all levels of society need stories and narratives to frame why they should do the things they do. It’s a very powerful way of trying to get people to see a route to action, a story that they might be able to alter themselves. So I decided that I wanted to engage on this question of how do we tell the story of water, of the complexity and of the challenges of water? I wanted to tell a story that that would provide a mosaic of experiences. I was at the time working in a conservation organization, the Nature Conservancy so I had access to natural history, documentary makers. I essentially started engaging a few of them that I knew and started throwing around ideas.
This three-hour three-part series emerged, which was really a first attempt at telling this complicated, multifaceted story of water, trying to give a picture of what is the problem with water and how do we think about the solution? Some of the work that I was doing for the book sort of made its way into the documentary and it was very powerful. Aside from an enjoyable experience, it was also very different mode of storytelling. Visual storytelling is very emotive, so it was a really powerful experience.
PO: You had fabulous stories to tell. I would encourage anyone, if they can access it, to watch. It was broadcast on the BBC recently. But you had beautiful episodes from the resurrection plant, your pieces in Egypt, which is a good segue because that was one of the very first civilizations we think about that arose around a very fixed point in time with social structures around it. So, when did we first begin to stand still in a world of moving water?
GB: That’s the starting point for my story and it’s about 10,000 years ago. The date is variable. It’s not a day, a date, a time, obviously, but around 10,000 years ago, we have this sort of neolithic revolution. And we essentially start seeing in the archaeological record communities that emerge that are sedentary and then eventually that they are sedentary and eventually agricultural. And it’s a very particular moment in time. It’s an odd moment in time because human beings had been around already for, you know, some 300,000 years. And so we are talking about the very last 5% of the story of our species on the planet. For most of our story, we were hunter gatherers, nomads, tribal. We may have had complex social structure, but we’ve left very little trace our life before.
And then we become sedentary. And that’s what we today would identify as the start of history for us, or, I mean, civilizations and art and literature, there are exceptions, right? I mean, I think there are cultures that predate that moment, for example, the Aboriginal cultures of Australia. But for the most part, most of the institutions that most of us have experience of, their origins, their roots go back to that moment. And it’s a funny moment in time because we decided to stand still, as I said, and a world in which what is moving a lot because we’re coming out of the last ice age. And we know again that the sea level really only stabilized around 5,000 BCE. So we became still when still water was streaming down from glaciers where the landscape was still being heavily modified. The experience of those early communities were one in which the water on the landscape was probably an incredibly overwhelming force, one that they had to reckon with. And that’s the starting point for this question of, how do we then band together to confront this agent on the landscape?
PO: If I could borrow a phrase from the book, because of water’s force, individuals had limited power in controlling their own environment. Alone, they were quite vulnerable.
GB: This is something that our grandparents or maybe their parents would’ve found completely ordinary. It’s just that you and I, and most of us, have grown up in an age where that vulnerability is largely hidden. We live in secure houses and cities that are mostly covered in cement where water is being managed by somebody through large infrastructure that sits far from where we live. But that’s a very anomalous condition for most of history, people have this very visceral and very immediate experience of water as a very powerful agent on the landscape.
PO: One of the revelations is that this is one of the things that maybe caused us to coalesce together as a society because alone as farmers, our lives could be disrupted, but we had to, as a society, learn how to exercise its own power, which was the beginning of that. We can picture dams and conduits and channels that we have today, but what did it look like 10,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago?
GB: In some ways, it didn’t look all that much different scale wise. It was smaller it’s still the case that the early Sumerians were prone to building levies or building canals and the same in a way goes for the Egyptians. One of the things that’s interesting about looking at the history of water, there was far more diversity within those kind of broad brush strokes. There was far more diversity in ancient civilizations in dealing with water than there is today. Today is actually remarkably homogeneous. You go to Tokyo to London to Vancouver or to LA, your experience of water is pretty much the same. You don’t wade the river on the way to work. You get water out of a tap that comes out of the wall and you go into the bathroom to shower.
It’s a very sort of homogeneous experience, in antiquity it wouldn’t have been because it would’ve been tailored to the particular hydrology of the landscape. And so the experience of the societies was quite different. But they all have a similar property, which is that the natural distribution of water on the landscape, which is a reflection of the climate system. It rains on the planet in different places because the climate system functions that way. S weather system is about a thousand kilometers in width. That’s ass true now as it was true, 10,000 years ago, rivers have certain lengths because the distances between where it rains and where it can reach the sea are set by the geography, not by any particular human construct.
And in most cases, the experience of water is one that just geographically transcends the individual. there are some cases where individuals have a lot of agency on their life where their agency is sufficient to deal with most water experiences and that was the case in ancient Greece and, and, and, and some parts of Italy, which is why, you know, I then talk about them a fair amount, but for the most part, particularly for the great river civilizations, the civilizations that developed along big rivers, their experience of water simply could not be managed.
The agency of water on the landscape far exceeded the agency of any individual. And so it forced this question of, well, how do you express the agency of a society rather than just of any individual? And that requires coordination, it requires mobilizing resources, having some people paid to build levies while others grow food. Quite quickly, you end up in a situation where the relationship with water contributes to shaping the institution society. I’m very careful in the book not to make claim that one determine the other. It’s not that water, single handedly determines the route we travel by, you know, it’s, we have agency, but it certainly provides boundary conditions that contribute to shaping the road we take.
PO: People often say the right to rule in China was associated with your ability to govern water, that if you could control water, people felt well, you’d pretty much earn the right to govern, but if the water became unruly and there was disorder, then yeah, it was, I don’t know how good this guy is or this dynasty is, and you could almost see it correlating with power.
GB: That’s right. And I think in part of this is because, the character for power, one of the characters for power is actually a combination of levy and water. And I think there are many reasons for this, one of them, which is an obvious one, is that the nature of the rivers that flow down the Himalayas is Monsoonal. These rivers create large natural levy systems and embankments they’re quite destructive. If you are trying to grow society and grow food on the, on the planes of these rivers, sooner or later, you’ll find yourself in this problem of having to manage these rivers. And what happened in China was that, at some point for accidental reasons, I would say, a particular philosophy won out in dealing with the power of rivers, one of, of essentially muscling your way to managing these rivers, essentially controlling them, right? So it was river control rather than learning how to live with the force of the river.
That locked Chinese society in a very dangerous place because they had to build very powerful levies to contain the river, but by containing the rivers, they forced it to flow faster and deeper, which then meant that the subsequent floods would be more dangerous, which meant that they had to build even greater levies. That would’ve led to a kind of continuous cycle of escalation, if you will. The risk of catastrophic failure of infrastructure became so great as to jeopardize the very legitimacy of the state. Right. And that is the story of China and it’s a fascinating story. In some ways, it is still true to this day. I mean, that desire to demonstrate control of nature is in fact, behind the construction of Three Gorges Dam, which is the largest dam on the planet.
PO: The stakes got higher and higher, the more they committed to this one route, it became devastating if, if anything went wrong with it.
GB: In this debate between water control and water management is one that’s very alive in the sort of practitioner world, right? For example, in America itself in north America, until the great flood of the Mississippi of 1927, the army corps engineers, which is essentially the plumber in chief of the American landscape, would’ve argued for complete river control. And I think since then the army corps and other institutions that manage water in the United States have become more, much more susceptible to thinking about river management and the question of how do you allow the river to expand and how do you make room for the river, right?
So there’s this idea that you actually manage rivers in a more adaptive way, but overall, I think you’re right overall, we’ve sort of seen from the moon and looking down on the planet, we’ve pretty much embraced this kind of infrastructure heavy, control approach to our hydrology. What I was trying to do, wasn’t necessarily telling a story of water for its own sake, I was trying to reconstruct the roots of the institutions that we see dominating today. I was quite selective in going backwards in time. Not because those stories are not interesting, but because they’re not really the ones that shape the institutions that are dominant today.
PO: And like these institutions that are dominant today, the institutions that come up with the ideas of building dams, straightening rivers, I think they’re revising their thinking. You’ve a fabulous statement in the book, changes in the climate system will eventually shatter the illusion of any final emancipation from nature. That idea that we’re emancipated from it was a Victorian idea. Do you think that’s shattered now? And how are people going to need to respond?
GB: It was Victorian, and then it particularly was progressive. It was the progressive era of the United States that really put a nail in the coffin. I mean, it essentially was the promise of the modern state, that in exchange for high levels of taxation and high levels of regulatory interference, you would delegate the problem of delivering security and, and the first security, particularly in 1900s, still 40% of the United States lived on the land.
The first form of security is security from the variability of nature and so indeed for most of the 20th century, we’ve lived under this illusion that this has worked. And by the way, the illusion, the solution that was developed, the big dams, the canals, et cetera, are the answer to a question. They are the answer, the technical answer to the question of how do we run a society that can essentially run at the rhythm and beat of industrialization so that we get up in the morning, we go up at bed, we, can do that nine to five every day from Monday to Saturday without any interruption, because it rains? It has a very different calendar and a very different rhythm from an agricultural society.
The important thing to realize is that this is not a discussion about a technical solution that might go wrong, it is about a vision of an economy that might of work. So now we have climate change. Climate change changes the signal that had against which all of this infrastructure had been calibrated. The 20th century, we lit the world with dams, canals, with infrastructure, with technology, essentially to turn a variable signal in time and space into a reliable and constant signal at our tap. That’s what that infrastructure did. Now, the variability is changing and it will, in many cases exceed the capacity of what we’ve built. We’ve seen this recently. I mean, when Ida came through New York, you know, the subway flooded now that subway wasn’t designed to be flooded, it wasn’t expected that it would flood.
It’s just a symptom of the fact that the phenomena that the climate system is providing and is now exceeding the statistics on which those solutions were built. That’s the big motivation, if you will, for this book is to say, careful folks, the problems are coming and where those problems show up is not just in the failure of infrastructure. This is not just about, oh, well, we’ll just build there for another piece of infrastructure. The thing is the infrastructure we built was underwritten by a rapidly growing economy at a very different time.
What are the economic implications of the failure of that? That particular 20th century solution, what will happen when we suddenly find ourselves with cities repeatedly flooded, with cities that are no longer able to provide, for example, the fresh fruit and vegetables that we are become accustomed to, what will happen when food systems, sewer systems fail? Now for the rich part of the world, that problem may be manageable, at least in the immediate future. Certainly not if we get into very, very significant climate changes, but in the immediate future, it will.
But the most vulnerable parts of the world, which are exposed to climate variability, will fall off a cliff, right? And then you’ll have things like migrations, you have disruptions to social order and those things then have a funny way of propagating across the world. One of the points I make is that the problems that come from climate change will not travel along the rivers and along the waterways of the world, they’ll travel through the human institutions and through society. In fact, we might find that the biggest products of water insecurity is a flood of people rather than a flood of water.
PO: No one’s isolated from it. The less well developed, the less well-off people may be bearing the brunt of the impact. But nevertheless, we had some glimpses into that with the refugees from Syria landing on the beaches of Greece, which some people would argue, you could trace back to shifts in agricultural yield, which led to other political instability as well in the region.
GB: Asaad should be blamed for what’s happened in Syria obviously, but the strains on the agricultural system, the strains on the food system, this wasn’t just about local scarcity. This was also about the food price spikes that happened over the course of all those years. So it’s about the vulnerability, the most vulnerable are going be the ones that show us what the consequences of a changing climate will be. And one of the advantages of looking at 10,000 years of history is that, the fact of the matter is this has happened over and over and over again. I mean, this is not new. We shouldn’t be surprised, this is how human systems, even very unequal human systems, end up responding.
PO: So what should we do?
GB: I think part of the motivation for framing this in political language in political terms was that I have this concern that we’ve framed all of these issues as fundamentally science led technology issues. There’s some expectation that the answer to these problems is, well, the scientists will tell us what to do, and then we’ll just develop technology and do it. And of course, that’s true. We will need science to know what might happen, and we will need technologies to solve these problems in some way. But the reality is somebody will have to pay for that technology, the land in which this technology will have to be placed, will have to be used for that. There are fundamentally political questions that are underlying all of these issues and my observation is that politics doesn’t really have the language to talk about these things.
If you ask yourself, do political programs, for example, reflect the sophistication of the issues that we face, they don’t. I mean, arguably at the beginning of the 20th century, for better or for worse, there was an articulation of what the future of a country like the United States could look like that incorporated a very precise vision of the landscape and the water in it. FDR was elected four times. If you read his programs, he had a vision for what he would do with the rivers of the country, what he would do with the landscape, , the conservation cause that he would start et cetera, et cetera.
Whereas today we are such an urbanized society that most politicians don’t really incorporate in the language of politics, these issues. It’s more a question of saying, well, we’ll have to spend money on engineering and technology. And I think in fact, these are deeply value based issues. They’re about what do we care about? What do we want our home to look like? For example, the west of the United States is undergoing right now a crisis. Its climate has essentially shifted. So I don’t know that it’s any longer useful talk about a drought. I think it’s actually entered a slightly different climate regime. And the question that it faces is not just, well, should we build desalination plants? The question is faces is what does the landscape look like? Should it be look green? The, you know, should our cities look green?
Where should we put our cities? Should we have millions of people living in San Diego when in fact it’s underlying capacity for supporting people is maybe a few thousand and maybe the answer is yes, but what are the consequences of that? I think there’s a values-based policy discussion that’s required because the choices that we have are going be very big and so they require legitimacy and to have legitimacy, they have to involve people. People need to be able to debate them and so that to me is where we go next.
The distribution of impact will be highly, highly unequal. The big issue is not that there’s a meteorite hitting us, it is that some people will feel the consequences of that meteorite while others can blindly go on. That is what creates the political tension that you need into institutions to resolve. That’s why it’s fundamentally political problem.
PO: And you have to make it accessible and you’ve got to communicate it in a way that politicians understand. That’s one of the key roles your work plays and indeed all the speaking you’re doing around the book, the communication. I know you’ve doing more work around World Water Week and hopefully at the United Nations Water Summit in March 2023.
There’s something to be said by being able to look back in history and look at, say, the qanats in and contextualize it for today It may be not a one size fits all, but the one size that we have chosen to fit no longer fits, that’s probably the key thing you can say. We look forward to continuing to track the progress of the book and the influence you’re having.
