Low water levels expose the bell mouth spillway at Ladybower Reservoir, in Derwent Valley, UK, on Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. More parts of the UK entered drought conditions, after England had its driest start to the year since 1976 and heat waves boosted water demand. Photographer: Dominic Lipinski/Bloomberg
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The global water system is showing its fragility, and water resilience is fast becoming a defining challenge for economies and investors. UN-Water estimates two-thirds of the world’s population faces shortages for at least a month each year. Analysis by CDP warns that companies could face $225 billion in costs from water-related risks in the short term, while as much as $2.5 trillion in corporate revenue is at risk if water scarcity disrupts supply chains and markets.
Cape Town’s near “Day Zero,” droughts across southern Europe, and the shrinking Colorado River all point to the same reality – no region can assume security. As Roheen Berry, founder of Beyond Water, put it in an interview, without water, “You haven’t got a functional economy, you haven’t got a functional society, and you certainly haven’t got functional business.”
Yet at the same time, bottled water has become a $350 billion industry, forecast to exceed half a trillion by decade’s end. It can market itself as resilience, a backup when taps run dry, but in practice it is a fragile logistics chain built on finite extraction, plastic packaging, and long-haul transport.
The lesson for business and investors is emerging. Resilience will not come from more pipelines, plastic, or megaplants, but from localized and diversified sources that treat water as infrastructure produced close to where it is needed. The question is no longer whether water is a material risk, but how to build resilience into the systems that depend on it.
Governance Can’t Solve Scarcity Alone
Policy frameworks are straining to keep up. In the U.S. Southwest, states remain locked in conflict over the shrinking Colorado River. Similar disputes play out in the Nile Basin and South Asia, while Europe has begun mandating drought resilience in national infrastructure plans. Scarcity has become as much a governance and economic challenge as a natural constraint.
Technology cannot resolve those conflicts on its own, but it can expand the options available. Established methods such as seawater desalination and wastewater recycling already supply hundreds of millions of people, but they remain capital-intensive and geographically constrained. Alongside them, new approaches are emerging. These innovations won’t replace the need for governance, but can diversify supply and reduce reliance on fragile logistics.
Beyond Water: Local Generation From Air
Berry’s company Beyond Water is betting on atmospheric water generation (AWG) as a decentralized answer to scarcity. The inspiration came from NASA’s closed-loop life support systems, and its generators use solar power to extract, mineralize, and purify water directly from humidity.
Previous efforts to commercialize AWG in the U.S., Israel, and China struggled with efficiency and cost, leaving many investors skeptical. That makes validation critical. Independent certification has confirmed Beyond Water’s output exceeds WHO, EPA, and EU drinking water standards, a baseline requirement for safety and regulatory acceptance. A lifecycle analysis now underway will determine the system’s true carbon and energy profile, though Berry emphasizes the footprint is “near-zero when powered by our integrated solar solutions.”
On cost, commercial-scale units deliver water at a fraction of bottled alternatives, around $0.04–$0.07 per liter versus $0.50–$3.00 for bottled water. That makes AWG most competitive for businesses replacing imported supplies or municipalities that justify the higher upfront cost as a hedge against drought. One example is Google’s India headquarters, where rooftop AWG units supply dispensers for more than 18,000 staff, eliminating bottled imports and reducing logistics costs.
Perhaps most importantly given growing water scarcity, Berry frames AWG as additive rather than extractive, saying, “We don’t extract; we generate new water, increasing the overall supply sustainably.” For regions dependent on bottled imports, it represents not just a cleaner option but a structural shift — water generated where it’s needed, not hauled across oceans.
OceanWell: Subsea Desalination At Scale
OceanWell is taking a different path, adapting desalination for the deep ocean. Conventional seawater plants already supply nearly 100 million cubic meters a day, but they are costly, energy-intensive, and discharge hyper-saline brine that damages coastal ecosystems. OceanWell’s subsea farms aim to invert that model by harnessing natural ocean pressure to drive reverse osmosis, cutting energy use by up to 40% and dispersing brine more safely in the deep sea. Each pod can produce a million gallons a day, and modular scaling reduces the need for massive coastal megaplants.
While long-term impacts on deep-sea ecosystems remain under study, chief executive Robert Bergstrom points to Navy testing, California Coastal Commission approval, and municipal partnerships as evidence that both technical and regulatory risks are being addressed. “We have taken an approach of inclusion and transparency with regulators and environmental NGOs across every stage of development,” he said.
OceanWell positions itself not as a replacement for Gulf or Israeli megaplants but as a complement: a modular, lower-impact source of new supply that can be licensed or scaled globally. As Bergstrom put it, “The scale of the water crisis means no single technology is enough… OceanWell is designed to integrate into a hybrid water supply portfolio, offering a sustainable, scalable, low-impact source of new supply that complements other approaches.”
WAVR: Water Resilience In The Desert
WAVR Technologies, a spinout from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is developing AWG adapted for arid regions. Using bioinspired hydrogels and liquid desiccants, its systems aim to extract water even at humidity levels as low as 10%.
For the U.S. Southwest, where each Las Vegas resident uses about 100 gallons a day, such efficiency could reduce pressure on overstretched reservoirs. “We’re aiming to achieve those kinds of volumes: thousands of gallons of water produced every day,” said co-founder and engineering professor H. Jeremy Cho.
The company is still early stage, supported by the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Engines program and a $4 million raise from Desert Forge Ventures and Nevada’s state venture fund. Chief executive Rich Sloan said, “With the tenuous nature of the water resource, we need to look for ways to make it last longer and enable all the economic growth we want to drive in our communities.”
Investment Appetite Is Shifting
Water has long been underfunded, attracting just 4.5% of Europe’s climate-tech capital in 2024,despite trillions in potential damages from underinvestment. Yet capital flows are beginning to shift. According to Roland Berger and White & Case’s Water Market Sentiment Survey 2025, 96% of respondents plan to maintain or increase water investment this year, with nearly 40% ranking it their top priority.
The World Bank estimates that global investment in water-related infrastructure must reach $6.7 trillion by 2030 and $22.6 trillion by 2050 to meet growing demand and build resilience. Public commitments such as the European Investment Bank’s €15 billion water pledge are designed to de-risk projects, giving private investors confidence to enter what has traditionally been seen as a high-risk sector.
Overcoming Entrenched Systems
Innovation on its own cannot change the structure of the water sector, governed as it is by rights regimes, centralized utilities, and entire industries built on extracting, bottling, and transporting supplies. Policy will be decisive, as it was in renewables, where feed-in tariffs and tax credits gave investors confidence to back technologies once seen as risky and turned solar and wind into bankable investments. Water will likely require the same.
There may be investor appetite, but standardized frameworks and clear incentives will be needed to mobilize capital at scale. Mechanisms such as drought resilience credits, procurement standards, or resilience mandates could do for water what tax credits and zero-emission targets did for clean energy.
The Next Wave Of Water Resilience
Water scarcity is no longer a distant threat but a structural challenge already reshaping economies. Policy frameworks alone cannot resolve the conflicts, and technology on its own cannot overcome entrenched systems. Together however, they can redefine what resilience looks like.
For business leaders and investors, water resilience and innovation is no longer an environmental issue. It is economic resilience, social stability, and future-proofed growth in an age of accelerating scarcity. The future will not be defined by one technology but by a portfolio that localizes, diversifies, and reduces systemic risk. Those who treat water as a frontier infrastructure market, combining distributed generation, subsea scale, and regional innovation, will be best placed to manage risk and capture opportunity.
Low water levels expose the foreshore at Woodhead Reservoir in Longdendale, UK, on Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. More parts of the UK entered drought conditions, after England had its driest start to the year since 1976 and heat waves boosted water demand. Photographer: Dominic Lipinski/Bloomberg
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