Climate Change is Water Change
By 2050, 1.6B people will face flood risk and 3.2B people will face severe water scarcity
46% of Americans already experience drought and 12% already experience floods
In 2021, 41% of Americans were impacted by floods, droughts, heat-waves, and/or forest fires
1.6 million Americans currently lack regular access to safe drinking water
Extreme weather cost the US economy $99B in 2021 alone
45-years - average age of US water infrastructure
In 1656, Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch mathematician and physicist invented the pendulum clock - a mechanism of timekeeping that works precisely by the methodic tracking of harmonic oscillation. Despite the extreme swings, the clock can keep time due to the constant, predictable movement of the pendulum. All worked well with the pendulum clock until 1773 when Daniel Bernoulli added a second pendulum, a compound pendulum to the pendulum clock. This time, the oscillations that gave the pendulum clock its predictable timekeeping characteristic now became extreme, erratic and increasingly unreliable.
The earth’s climate operates similar to a pendulum clock, with natural variations caused by the earth’s rotation, proximity to the sun and other biospheric and biological changes over time. But the pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere combined with the overnutrification of soil and water (65% of US estuaries and coastal waters) tampers with delicate ecosystems responsible for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and regulating natural climatic variability. The result is a series of climatic events that are akin to hanging a double pendulum from a pendulum clock. Warming as a result of GHG concentrations pull the natural extremes of summer and winter, and atmospheric and geospheric variations to disproportionately extreme and unpredictable levels. The natural dynamics of the hydrologic system can no longer keep up as wild temperature variations pull the system to points previously unseen. And while those extremes may be caused by greenhouse gases, the molecule through which climate change is most viscerally expressed is water.
Water and climate are intricately linked, with extreme weather events – droughts, floods, sea-level rise, intensifying storms – manifested through changes in the water cycle. Climate change is leading to more variable, unpredictable, and often catastrophic water outcomes. And because water is so fundamental, every industry, government and company around the world face severe water quantity (too little and too much), quality, and equity challenges, whether they understand it or not. Water - the fundamental molecule on which all of life and all of the earth’s systems depend - is the medium by which climate change is felt on earth. Here’s why.
Dramatic Changes in Water Availability
As temperatures rise, water evaporates at higher rates (an increase of 5.4% per decade across water reservoirs globally) into an atmosphere that can now similarly hold more water. Storm clouds become even more menacing as they are literally more massive. When these clouds reach their saturation point, they unleash deluges of water across the earth, so much so that 1.8 billion people face significant flood risk - more than 1 in 5 humans. In arid areas, the increased evaporation leaves behind dry earth so cracked and parched it can no longer readily absorb water. Sudden storms leave communities prone to flash floods - up to 10% in the US Southwest alone - and fail to replenish stores of groundwater. Water invades streets and homes, causes sewers to overrun and becomes polluted. Communities are left flooded but without clean water. Water infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle these once-in-a-century storms that have become an annual occurrence. This is in the context of aging water mains that break every two minutes across the US alone, losing 6 billion gallons of treated water a day.
Trickle Down Effects
In communities that are flooded, schools and businesses close, and in communities where water runs dry, drastic conservation measures must be taken and growth is limited. Jobs are lost and food can become scarce. Flooding alone cost the global economy $105bn in 2021. But the problem is that the most vulnerable communities often experience these extreme dynamics over and over again. They are least equipped to handle them, and the most likely to face them. Lack of insurance or access to resources means flood and drought events can have long-term devastating effects. In parts of the world - Myanmar, Syria, Sudan, Madagascar a few many recent examples - floods and droughts lead to food shortages, job loss, hunger, disease, social unrest and political instability. People move. And often to places where water resources are already overburdened and overstressed, exacerbating an already exacerbated situation. Globally, reservoir levels decrease as demand pressure increases, and the consequences of depleted water reservoirs can be irrevocable.
Oceans and Deserts
Compounding the flood-drought conundrum are their natural extremes - oceans and deserts. A third pendulum on our compound pendulum clock, increased temperatures cause glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise. Communities experiencing extreme storms are also vulnerable from below - through sea water intrusion. Flooding worsens as the water pours in from the skies and the coasts. As the oceans themselves become warmer, their circulatory path around the globe becomes disrupted. El Niña becomes a yearly event (occurring for the third time in row in 2022) that threatens coastal communities around the globe. Inland from the coasts, dry areas become drier and deserts grow. People demand more from less land with less water, stressing already stressed ecosystems. Groundwater recharge decreases or disappears altogether, the Colorado River down 20% this year. As fragile systems reach their tipping point, the outskirts of our deserts blend into the deserts themselves often in ways that are irredeemable.
Changes in Storage, Loss of Biodiversity and Global Instability
As the extremes become more extreme, the root forces that maintain equilibrium become less strong. Water storage changes with increased evaporation, decreased snowpack, over-extraction and flash flooding. These changes can lead to downstream decreases. As lakes, reservoirs, and rivers run dry - the Aral Sea, Lake Mead and Yangtze River included - our ability to provide running water and electricity becomes threatened. Dried out waterbeds can leave behind storms of toxic dust that decrease air quality and choke human health. At the same time, overnutrification of our soils leads to dangerous algal blooms and cyanobacteria. Warmer oceans that can absorb more carbon dioxide become more acidic and more hostile to delicate biological processes for life in the oceans. 70% of fisheries around the world have or are at-risk of collapse as water quality on land decreases with greater sedimentation and nutrients left behind by storm events and increased salinity of flood water on the coasts. Communities lose not just clean water, but the businesses, livelihoods, peace and security which water supplies typically secure.
Water is fundamental to all life, but exists in a precise balance in nature. When that balance has a GHG-shaped truck driven through it, you get massive problems, i.e. floods, droughts, sea level, ocean acidification, and loss of biodiversity. If we miss the fundamental role water plays we cannot understand the practical urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and accelerating their removal. We will fundamentally fail to prepare for the consequences of the emissions already released and the inevitable emissions to come.
93% of climate finance goes into climate mitigation leaving climate adaptation underfunded and often unacknowledged. VC-backed technology is certainly not the whole answer; we need heavy engineering, poured concrete, proven solutions at scale, etc. to handle the imminent and literal deluge of climate impacts. But we’re also not running anywhere near enough experiments to help us identify the new technologies and the emerging solutions that will help us cope in the wake of climate change. We founded BIV to be a small (and hopefully growing) part of the solution by investing in the people and the technologies that are best positioned to tackle the downstream effects of a double pendulum climate swing - water. We are fundamentally optimistic and are taking the opposite side of the Mad Max trade. If we’re right, it won’t be noisy steampunk water wars. But there is a lot of work to do between where we are now, and us being right.