, Columnist
Water and Money's $1 Trillion Relationship Crisis
With the U.S. and other countries needing massive water infrastructure spending, private capital will have to play a part.
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At this rate, Cape Town won't be the last big city to almost run out of water. Population growth, urbanization, old infrastructure, pollution and climate change: all are a recipe for more scarcity.
That's worrying because farming, electricity generation and manufacturing, not to mention Google and Amazon's data centers, depend on H2O -- and, of course, we need it to survive. "There's a 100 per cent correlation between water availability and GDP growth," says Arnaud Bisschop, a fund manager at Pictet Asset Management. "If there's no water there's no economic growth."