Sustainable Water Investment Summit Takeaways: Water Rights, Scarcity and Opportunities

Last week, leaders from a range of industries convened for two days in Los Angeles for Brownstein and WestWater’s inaugural Sustainable Water Investment Summit.

The summit featured Antonio Villaraigosa, former mayor of Los Angeles and current infrastructure advisor for the state of California. Tasked by Gov. Gavin Newsom to collaborate across local, state and federal levels to identify priority projects to address California’s pressing infrastructure needs and serve as a liaison with federal leaders to maximize California’s access to federal funding across all regions of the state, Villaraigosa appears keenly aware of both the unprecedented challenges (including regulatory bottlenecks) that the state faces and unique opportunities presented by federal infrastructure funding.

While summit speakers and attendees were from diverse states, countries and industries of origin, the speakers appeared to be in agreement that our water regime is now at a point where, as one speaker put it, “there is no average year”—we are in a paradigm of dry, drier, driest, and then “call for the ark” with flooding and mudslides from torrential downpours throughout the West. This climate reality, coupled with changing population dynamics and preferences (where people live, actually want to live and demand for a protein-rich diet)—mean that these are unprecedented times of both challenge and opportunity.

Although we cannot capture each takeaway from the summit, we highlight a few standouts below:

1. No substitutes exist. Why does water get so much attention? As one speaker put it, water is the only commodity for which there is no substitute, at any price. Shortage of oil? Or wheat?—the market will find a substitute, perhaps at some cost and potential hassle. With water, there is no alternative.

2. Water scarcity exists despite impressive efficiency gains. We love to tout our improving water efficiency successes, whether in terms of appliances and new technology, agricultural practices or individual practices. But at a global scale, water scarcity is undoubtedly growing rapidly, driven by multiple factors such as economic growth, demand for more protein-rich diets and climate-driven changes to weather patterns.

3. Even the non-Westerners are catching on. Several speakers and attendees—like many in the finance community—commented that they hail from east of the Rockies and are seeing an emerging […]

Full article: Sustainable Water Investment Summit Takeaways: Water Rights, Scarcity and Opportunities