Reconnecting people to water, through nature

The challenge. Our bold (natural) solution.

Each day, many of us feel overwhelmed by a media barrage of ever-increasing global crises: climate change, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, depleted food stocks, and mountains of plastic waste being dumped into our oceans. We hear high-frequency clarion calls – from conferences, politicians, protesters – butted up against equally vocal criticism calling for tangible action. At the same time, the solutions we’re offered seem abstract, far-fetched, intangible and downright impossible.

But that doesn’t have to be the case.

What if we could restore nature and provide for people? What if we could adapt to a changing climate and keep it from getting worse? What if solutions not only abounded, but were actually within our reach?

That’s why we created the Nature for Water Facility – to restore landscapes while securing our freshwater future, for people and wildlife alike. This initiative is the brainchild of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and sustainable infrastructure consultancy Pegasys, birthed from a shared resolve to implement practical actions to tackle some of the most urgent global crises: water scarcity, biodiversity loss and climate change. We’re doing this by re-connecting people to water, through nature.

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We’ve lost touch.

Where does our water come from? How far did it travel? Who cleaned it, and how? Many of us have the luxury of not having to think about the answers to these questions, provided our water never runs dry. But hold on: it already has run dry, in major global cities. Cape Town almost became the first post-modern victim of Day Zero. Even larger cities – the megalopolises of Chennai and S?o Paulo – have tiptoed on the unknown edge of Day Zero. Sadly, negative water security trends continue at a voracious pace in other global cities.

So how does nature fit into this picture? And why do we think it holds the key to securing our water?

Science shows us that nature makes our water system work. Forests, grassy plains and wetlands purify our water at the source. Then that water makes its way to your taps — in your bathroom, your kitchen, your workplace.

It’s clear that urbanization has altered humanity’s relationship with earth’s water. High-density living environments have created distance between where we live and the natural systems we rely on. To provide urban populations with drinking water, for instance, we dammed rivers, re-routed natural streams, and drew water from ancient underground reservoirs. And now, decades later, we’ve forgotten where it came from.

At the same time, urban encroachment, deforestation, and climate change have drastically changed this infrastructure—silting-up our dams, drying our riverbeds, erasing our natural brooks and streams, and sucking groundwater wells empty. What is more, the negative ecosystem effects are widespread and undeniably shocking.

What’s needed?

In a word, nature.

And more people are starting to agree. The water sector is ‘waking up’ to the role nature can play in building healthy source watersheds, as opposed to a historical bias focused exclusively on concrete pipes and treatment plants. These approaches – dubbed Nature-based Solutions (NbS) – are actions that protect, sustainably manage or restore ecosystems while delivering biodiversity and human benefits. In a watershed context, this means investing in the integrity of our natural landscapes to ensure the integrity of our water resources for future generations.

But, we face a ‘nature gap’. Despite interest in NbS, actual investment remains frustratingly small — less than 1% of total water sector spend. Our thesis with the Facility is that this ‘nature gap’ is partially attributable to a market failure in the availability of service providers that can help ideate, develop and launch watershed investment programs.

And how?

To validate our hypothesis, we surveyed a number of watershed custodians across three continents – Africa, Asia, and Europe. The surveys and interviews confirmed the growing awaking for the need to protect source watersheds to ensure commercial operations.

Per the Head of Sustainability at a large UK utility, “We realized that the business would not be viable nor sustainable if we don’t take into account the watershed.”

Unanimously, their understanding of ‘why’ these new interventions are needed is nearly fully formed, but their understanding of the ‘how’ remains very much in its infancy. Managing natural landscapes lacks the well-worn grooves of traditional grey infrastructure approaches, as it crosses messy jurisdictional lines, requires different expertise, and has a novel set of handoff points.

A Belgian utility with an interest and mandate in promoting watershed health summed up their comfort level with developing NbS simply: “We feel incapable.”

A different UK water utility similarly bemoaned a lack of internal know-how, stating, “Our partners do not necessarily think of natural opportunities, which means that our company is having to drive these conversations a lot, but this doesn’t match our expertise. We don’t necessarily know what solutions are needed.”

These conversations pointed to a consistent theme: a desire to care for source watersheds, but a lack of the necessary internal competencies to do so and a gap in the service provider landscape for sourcing relevant support. For example, the CEO of a West African utility noted, “We have never had any external providers come to us offering Nature-based or catchment management solutions and walked us through the opportunities.”

That’s where the Nature for Water Facility comes in. It’s designed to address this market failure head-on by identifying and equipping local champions who want to build these programs with dedicated specialist teams that have the right skills and experience to provide hand-in-hand support.

In other words, we provide the ‘how’.

What we do.

How do we address this market failure? At the Nature for Water Facility, we’ve thought about this long and hard. Fortunately, we’re not considering this from a standing start; the TNC and Pegasys partnership enables us to draw on over two decades of practical experience, not to mention TNC’s track record of establishing over forty water funds across the globe. Our practical response comes in three complementary parts:

• Firstly, we diagnose the problem, by trying to better understand the full water security challenge. We identify the key source water areas, land use trends and water supply-demand equilibrium, and work to understand how the ecosystem functions. Then we identify the threats and competing demands on the ecosystem and link it to future water demand projections. This gives us a good grasp of the long-term problem we’re trying to address.
• Secondly, we apply Nature-based Solutions (NbS) as the primary way to regenerate and protect the upstream ecosystems that purify our water. These include, for example: reforestation, ecological buffers, soil erosion control, and wetland restoration. Our specialist team use sophisticated models to develop compelling NbS portfolios that best improve future water provision – both quantity and quality.
• Thirdly, and arguably of greatest importance, we help drive ‘collective action’, which we believe is the key to maximizing long-term impact. Without it, even the best NbS are ineffective. Collective action is a unifying force – it brings people, communities, organizations and governments together. Simply put, it is the process of envisioning, designing, planning and then delivering the future water outcomes we desire. We help develop teams, mentor decision-makers and design innovative funding approaches to ensure the selected NbS are implemented, can be properly maintained, and thrive.

Our unique value-add.

The Facility has been purpose-built with NbS and water security at its core. Importantly, it is a technical assistance facility that actually delivers technical assistance – we offer hand-in-hand support to the local champions driving opportunities on the ground via our team of dedicated specialists and experts.

When we reflected on over two decades of water funds, what stood out as a clear differentiator of success was a considered ‘process’ of development – a process that supported a local champion who had a strong desire to see intervention and realize change. We studied the similarities of these processes and began to define distinct development phases, as well as the key questions that guide confident decision-making. This led us to the creation of ‘products’ that we think attract resources – human, political and financial – to establish long-term watershed investment programs.

Our challenge was to take the best of a consultancy model and go beyond responding to a scope of work. We've created a centralized, multi-disciplinary team, that supports a local champion to deliver real outcomes. We have inculcated the agency to chase after the client's tangible success, as opposed to delivering a time-bound study and then disappearing. This enables us to be driven by our client's needs and enables adequate time for critical watershed ecosystems to grow resilient.

Furthermore, both TNC and Pegasys have aligned incentives: to take this Facility's services to market at scale. And this means not only driving internal best-practice, but also open-sourcing and sharing what we learn with the broader water sector community to maximize collective learnings. At the end of the day, our goal is promoting global water security via the health of our natural landscapes, and we are excited to support and partner with all parties aligned with that vision.

Join us!

Over the next four years, we aim to support 50 watershed investment programs across the globe. We’ll also share along our journey, by providing open-source tools and guidelines to help mainstream NbS in the water sector. Watch this space! Even better, join us on our journey at nature4water.org/

For more information, reach out to the Facility’s co-leads:

• Justus Raepple: [email protected]
• Michael Vice: [email protected]

The Nature for Water Facility is generously underwritten by the Dancing Tides Foundation, LGT Venture Philanthropy, the Africa Scale-Up Fund, and other donors.