In all parts of this planet we call home, we are witnessing climate change through water.
Warming temperatures and melting glaciers are threatening to leave nearly 2 billion people in Southeast Asia without reliable drinking water by century’s end — and that’s a best-case scenario.
The American Southwest in 2020 faced among its driest years on record—imperiling water supplies for tens of millions of people, and parching the country’s greatest source of fruits and vegetables.
Global warming is melting the snowpack that, for eons, had reliably supplied seasonal freshwater runoff to our rivers and lakes and aquifers; it’s accelerating the evaporation of water from soil, exacerbating droughts and fueling greater consumption of water needed for irrigation; it’s reshaping weather patterns and precipitation—all while our population nears 8 billion people.
Climate change, we have seen, is inextricable from our water supplies. And water is inextricable from our planet—and humans’ ability to thrive here.
Our need to optimize our water supplies—to adapt to impacts now while preparing for an even more water-constrained future — could not be more urgent.
So today, as we celebrate Earth Day, our team at DuPont Water Solutions has been reflecting on ways that we are investing in our planet and our water future. Every single day, we are working toward a vision of a water-optimized world in which every human has daily access to safe water and industry has the necessary water to make the products in which we rely.
We design and manufacture solutions to help our customers optimize water through purification, conservation and reuse. At the same time, we innovate these technologies to meet both our customers’ and DuPont’s sustainability goals—optimizing water more efficiently, using less energy, and reducing the carbon impact of safe water. If you want to see some of our customers’ sustainability drivers, read this.
But in the last year, we’ve invested in something very important—something we believe can change our world’s water future. We invested in optimism. And optimization. We invested in data. We invested in helping cities identify their best paths to a more water resilient future.
We invested in the City Water Optimization Index.
The City Water Optimisation Index, designed by Economist Impact with the help of water experts from around the world, doesn’t simply examine how well cities around the world are safeguarding their water supplies—it’s designed to arm city leaders, policymakers, regulators, and water managers with the information and insights they need to best protect their water supplies both now and for the decades to come.
This first Index spotlights 51 cities. Virtually everywhere we looked we found signs of severe water scarcity: acute water stress from Los Angeles, Mexico City, Santiago, and Madrid, to Baku, Dushanbe, Riyadh, and beyond.
But we also found signs of promise. Low- and middle-income cities—places such as São Paulo, Sofia, and Medellin—earned among the highest marks overall, showing that preparing for a water-scarce future, for all the challenges be they financial, political, geographic, or otherwise, doesn’t have to break a city budget. Better yet, low-cost steps such as finding and plugging leaks, updating building codes to incentivize water conservation, and instituting real-time monitoring are among the most effective for improving water reliability, accessibility, and sustainability.
The mundane—fodder for water-district meetings and regulatory findings and sewer commission hearings—may well be what helps save cities’ water supplies.
These sorts of actions are likely to enjoy broad support. Roughly 74% of those surveyed for the Index—some 5,100-plus people around the world—expressed “growing concerns about the safety and security of their drinking water.” In cities in developing nations, such as Mexico City, Pune, and Kathmandu, the figure climbs as high as 82%.
This, in short, is not merely a challenge—for city leaders, it is an opportunity.
Incorporating the use of reclaimed water, for example, is backed by more than half of those surveyed for the Index—and by 67% of those surveyed in low- and middle-income cities. Meanwhile, reimagining water as a circular, rather than linear process, unlocks enormous benefits for local water supplies.
Those are the sorts of gains that can be locked in through regular audits and accounting, real-time management, and public education to ensure continued high support for conservation and reclamation. They can be further reinforced by expanding sewer connectivity, incorporating AI-powered monitoring platforms, and instituting water reclamation.
Water scarcity isn’t a mere byproduct of climate change—rather, as UNICEF puts it, “change in climate is felt primarily through a change in water.” Preserving our water resources—and ensuring they remain reliable, accessible, and sustainable for the years and generations to come—is the challenge of our time, especially for the local leaders on the front lines.
This Index offers a playbook on how to address this challenge. Courageous local politicians, policymakers, and regulators can seize this moment—and make their cities international models for preparing for our climate future.
So, that’s just one example of what we are doing to invest in our planet. What will you do? If you need some ideas, check out this Earth Day toolkit we shared with our team.