Chapter 1: Introduction
7:37 So, how are you all? Fine. Good. Feeling good. So, all fed and watered. Excellent. So, I've been a water enthusiast and addicted to water really for many, many years now. So, it's really nice to sort of be representing, you know, the industry here today. Now, my name is Matthew Griffin. I'm the founder of the 311 Institute. We're a global futures and deep futures organisation working up to 50 years out.
8:06 I work with royal households. I work with the United Nations basically where we look at how we actually try to solve all of the United Nations SDGs and as we say at COP 28, COP 29, COP 30, when it comes to the world's problems, we have the solutions that we need. The question then becomes, do we actually have the investment and the willpower to actually scale those up and out? So in this particular presentation, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take you
Chapter 2: "Water isn't scarce": reframing the crisis
8:38 through the future of water scarcity, which is kind of ironic because water isn't scarce. Now, when we think about water, all of you are taking part in an industry that is actually providing everything that we all need. In 2010, the United Nations deemed access to fresh water as a fundamental human right. So when we think about installers, when we think about plumbers, when you're actually helping connect people's homes basically to the water mains and the piping and the systems and everything else, you're helping enforce a fundamental human right, which that's a big deal. It goes alongside Wi-Fi that a lot of teenagers think should be a human right.
9:32 Now, from a planetary perspective, we're called Earth. However, if you were an extraterrestrial and you came to this planet and you landed on the Pacific side, it would be called water. 97.5% of the world basically is seawater and saline. 2.5% is fresh water and only half of that is actually accessible. Now when we talk about accessible, this is where we talk about water that is not locked in ice. It's near the surface.
10:03 But typically when we talk about accessible in liquid form, we also don't talk about water from Earth's atmosphere. And globally, should there be any doubt about water scarcity, there are 366 billion trillion litres of water on our watery planet. So from a societal perspective, that sounds great. But this is the challenge.
Chapter 3: Who actually uses the world's fresh water
10:44 Today, agriculture uses 70% of potable and fresh water. Industry like the artificial intelligence industry, steel and aluminium industries use another 22%. And as humans, we have access to 8%. Now 8% of the available water that we actually have, that's still a lot of water. But we face fundamental challenges here because what we ultimately have is we have lots of water, but we've got the wrong kind of water in the wrong place.
Chapter 4: The real problem: distribution, not scarcity
11:24 We don't have a water scarcity problem. We have a water distribution problem. And that's where you come in and that's where you help. Today, basically, we have over 8 billion people on our planet. So, when we think about how we're trying to use the fresh water that we do actually have access to as the weather around us changes, we have more mouths and more people on the planet than ever before. Now from an agricultural perspective, if you want to feed 8 billion people, which we do, you need 10 billion tons of crops.
12:00 All these crops need water. They need fresh water. We have to raise 85 billion livestock. They need water. They need fresh water. Every year we're consuming 124 billion fish. This is what it takes to feed a planet. And so from an agricultural perspective, we kind of have problems. If you go to California, in California they grow almonds, but 90% of California over the past couple of years has been under drought conditions. So the almond farmers have been cutting their trees down. We see this across Europe. You know, last year we lost 40% of Europe's crops to high heat and high stress.
12:54 So, every year out of this 10 billion tons of food, should we say, that we grow, we're losing 40% to disease and pests. As we see temperatures rise, as we see the Earth's atmosphere become more moist and more wet, we see more pests and we see more disease like rot and mould and everything else basically in our crops and we try to use synthetic biology and genetic engineering to engineer new yeah new kinds of crops.
13:24 But 8% of the world's crops are wiped out by bad weather. So if you watch Clarkson's Farm basically you'll know that one day basically his crops basically are being flooded and the next day they are under drought conditions. We grow 10 billion tons of crops but 50% of that never ever reaches your plate. And out of that 50% that remains 30% of that goes into landfill because we have high amounts of food waste.
Chapter 5: The oceans: the climate time bomb
13:55 From an ocean perspective, the ticking time bomb from a climate perspective is not Earth's atmosphere. It's the oceans. We are loading one atomic bombs worth of heat into the Earth's oceans every second. So over the past 20 years, we've seen oceanic surface temperatures increase by half a degree C. Now that doesn't really sound very much. You wouldn't even notice that if it was your bath. But from an ocean perspective, that has increased oceanic pH by 30%.
14:31 It's impacted 66% of species in the Earth's ocean, especially those basically with calcified skeletons like starfish, echinoderms, bony fish, and it's actually reduced fisheries yields by 3%. This is all against basically an increasingly sort of runaway climate sort of agenda. But we've got more people coming onto the planet. And so these are trends basically that we need to try to reverse.
Chapter 6: The world's rivers under stress
15:08 When we think about the Earth's rivers, 66% of Earth's rivers do not get enough water. Two-thirds of the Earth's rivers are now imbalanced. 80% of all urban planetary discharge, so waste water from industrial plants, homes, goes straight into our rivers. We see that in the UK with a lot of the pollution statistics. And 90% of the Earth's rivers have high levels of microplastics according to the UNEP.
15:45 So on the one hand access to fresh water is difficult enough but then access to clean fresh water that's actually getting harder. So we have multiple problems as an industry that we need to try to solve. Now from a climate change perspective we're frankly in the position now where we have wetter wets and drier dries. This is why California can bake in the sun and Germany can drown in the floods.
16:21 So, we're now having many more weather extremes, which then means that the imbalance of having the right water in the right place at the right time is harder to manage. In China, they've been building waterways to connect the northwest of China with Beijing because increasingly China basically sees that water is going to be the thing that determines to a large degree their economic future. And this is the ridiculous piece.
16:55 None of you would be alive without water. Period. At all.
Chapter 7: Why Wall Street is buying water futures
17:02 From a consumer perspective, all of us treat water as a commodity. If you have a look at your energy bills for gas and electricity, most of you will complain about your energy bills. How many of you have ever complained about your water bill? Yeah. There you go. Yeah. 30 quid a month. There you go. Yeah. Exactly. It's been going water rates going up by 8%. Severn Trent Water again.
17:34 But the fact is we treat it as a commodity especially in the west. Now I travel around the world. I've been in 100 countries over the past couple of years. I was in Cape Town a long time ago but where Cape Town was on the very verge of running out of water. They were rationing water. They were rationing water and giving people about 50 litres of water a day.
18:17 But the fact of the matter is when you have a look at India basically, you know, we're using more potable water. There's a huge black market basically for water in India now especially in Delhi basically in other places. So as consumers we treat water as a commodity and in the UK we use about 135 to 140 litres per person and we are a little bit frugal with our water but we kind of take water running out of our taps for granted.
18:47 If our water isn't running out of our taps, then we call a plumber because we've got a leak somewhere. And do you know who doesn't increasingly treat water as a commodity or at least not in the same way that we consumers do? Wall Street. When you have a look at hedge funds, when you have a look at water leases, when you have a look at water contracts, increasingly Wall Street is trading water and water futures as an asset because they know that as water becomes increasingly imbalanced around the planet, scarce in some areas, they all know that you're going to need it. This is especially prevalent in the United States where we see water contracts, for example, up the Colorado River and we see people fighting over them and bidding. So by 2033, we estimate that water futures will be a $54 billion business at the moment. To put it into perspective, it's running at about $34 billion.
20:07 So as we see more water scarcity, as we see a growing population, as we see more challenges around agriculture, people are going to be buying your water for you and then your bills will increase.
Chapter 8: Solution: vertical farms
20:22 However, we have solutions. We have solutions for everything. So for example, if we want to actually reduce agriculture's impact on the planet just from a water perspective in London and Birmingham and Manchester, we have vertical farms. Vertical farms basically are farms in buildings like this that operate closed loop systems. So in a vertical farm we use 99% less potable water. We can either extract water from the air and the atmosphere or we just recycle water efficiently basically within the vertical farm itself.
21:08 We're scaling these throughout China, throughout the Middle East, and increasingly we're scaling these basically on the west coast of the United States. But they're expensive. In addition to that, when we think about the amount of water that cows and livestock need, yeah, we have 85 billion livestock today. That's a number that will soon be a 100 billion livestock.
Chapter 9: Solution: cellular agriculture
21:34 We can take a single cell from any animal on Earth, a cow, a chicken, a duck, a zebra, a Tyrannosaurus rex, a tiger. And we can put that single cell into what we call a bioreactor and we can grow fresh meat from that single cell. We do outside of a chicken what normally happens inside of a chicken. So we can feed the planet today and we've proven it with an infinite amount of chicken without ever having to kill a single chicken.
22:15 This trend is called cellular agriculture. And if you want to buy meat basically made in this way, go to Walmart in the United States. Go to Singapore and other places.
Chapter 10: Desalination that pays for itself
22:30 Now, when we think about the wrong kind of water being in the wrong kind of place in the Middle East, the vast majority of consumer water and industry water is actually desalinated. Similar basically in Spain. The Spanish government believed that the lower third of Spain roughly by 2050 will be arid. If you've been to Barcelona over the past couple of years, you'll notice that there's been water rationing going on in south southeast Spain.
23:02 So increasingly we see more desalination plants being built. But desalinated water is normally three times more expensive per litre than potable water. So guess what? We solved that. So we use renewable energy to boil water to split it out. So we've got pure water. Then we're left with brine. Now brine is very dangerous. You exfiltrate it into the sea, it'll kill anything it touches. So we process that brine and we can extract uranium and lithium from that brine. And then we sell the lithium for $3,000 a kilo basically to Volkswagen and anyone else basically that wants lithium in today's energy transition world. And now what we have is we have desalinated water that is the same cost as potable water or that we could even give away for free with zero energy footprint.
24:03 And the companies that are building these plants in Saudi Arabia, they're British.
Chapter 11: AI data centres and the water question
24:15 Now, that leaves us basically with the next scourge. AI data centres. Now, AI data centres consume huge amounts of electricity. When we think about some of the larger AI data centres today like the ones in Utah, we have 10 gigawatt data centres being built. Now to put it into perspective, an AI data centre that draws 10 gigawatt of electricity needs the equivalent of 10 nuclear power stations to power it.
24:50 Wow. But from a water perspective, these data centres are increasingly in water stressed areas. Now with Google and Google's new Texas AI data centre, which is a big hyperscale data centre, it doesn't use water. It's a closed loop system. However, if you actually go and have a conversation with Google and you say, "Right, you're building a new hyperscale AI factory in Austin in Texas and we've heard it doesn't use water." Then the head of sustainability for Google, she'll say, "No, it doesn't use water." No. And then she'll correct herself and you go, "Oh, here you go." She goes, "Actually, it does use water." And you're like, "Here you go. Here's the drop. It's a load of marketing hype." And she goes, "Yeah, it does actually use water. It uses water.
25:45 Water for the canteen. We have solutions to every problem that you can throw at us pretty much.
Chapter 12: The UK plumbing industry by the numbers
25:58 Now in the UK, the plumbing industry, so this is specifically water only. So the electricians can go and do their own thing. In the UK, trade supply basically for the plumbing industry basically is worth 3 billion pounds and the industry itself is worth 9 billion pounds and this is sort of last year. We've got 133,000 people that are employed in this sector. Now from an employment perspective, are we a market leader?
26:35 Are we in the UK building, designing new water, should we say infrastructure and systems that we can export to the rest of the world. Having worked in 100 countries, I don't think we are. We've got a huge opportunity here to actually export our world expertise and our technology expertise to the rest of the world in a way that no other country actually could. And over the next sort of six years as a country, we're investing a hundred billion dollars in new water infrastructure.
27:16 But by 2030, we will have a shortfall of 50,000 people. Now, this isn't actually that bad. If you look at the telecom sector globally, but I said we've got a shortfall of about 1.5 million people. So, we have a shortfall in the workforce that we actually need up to 2030 for both civil and consumer. So, you know, water-based things, but I think we can actually make that up, especially if government sorts out their regulations and everything else.
27:47 Yes, we've got 352,000 kilometres of clean water mains and most of these are being upgraded but a lot of them are very old as we know. But every year actually every day rather we are losing three billion with a B litres of treated water into the ground around us. So when we think about water scarcity and everything else, are there some things that we can actually do?
28:23 From a UK perspective, we are extracting less water from our aquifers today than we did 20 years ago. From a leaks perspective, we are losing less water today through leaks and leakage than we did 20 years ago. How many of you heard about that in the press? Or do you just continue to hear about the water utilities problems? Don't listen to the news. Now even though plumbing is a centuries old, even millennia old if we go back to Roman
Chapter 13: A millennia-old trade meets high tech
29:06 times basically with aquifers in Rome even though plumbing basically is a millennia old industry and trade it's meeting high tech. So as a futurist, I look up to 50 years out. I track over 600 emerging technologies and we're doing some interesting things. So if any of you think that Britain's critical national infrastructure is safe, that we are done, we can pack up for the day. We haven't got started yet.
30:19 And as the UK, we are world leaders increasingly in cyber. Now when we think about nanotechnology, increasingly basically we're using nanotechnology like graphene and nanofibre composites to create what we call single-step filtration systems. Now on the one hand these single-step filtration systems increasingly filter out viruses, microplastics and all these kinds of things. So we have ways to clean up the rivers and the water basically that we are pushing into treatment centres.
30:56 In the UK specifically, we are almost the world leader in developing robotics that go and monitor, assess, and diagnose problems with infrastructure. Whether that be Rolls-Royce jet engines or whether it be the pipes beneath our feet. And then when we think about trying to identify wastewater leakage and everything else, we're using sound. So we can use hyperspectral sensing, we can use quantum sensing and all sorts. You can put a hyperspectral sensor onto a drone and you can identify where the underground leaks are. And you can do that autonomously while you're actually having a cup of tea.
31:42 But with companies like Suez, we're using sound. So we can hear where the leaks are. Now when we think about the home, increasingly we can use artificial intelligence, bearing in mind that ChatGPT that you use today has an IQ of 155. It has 4,000 times more general knowledge than any human, which is why you can ask it, "How would I rig a boiler? How would I bake a cake? How do I do a project management task?" So today you have access to super intelligent artificial intelligence.
32:22 Gemini 3.5, Grok 4, they are all post-PhDs. So on the one hand basically we can use bots and artificial intelligence basically in the workforce basically to accelerate learning and development to help diagnosis you know all sorts of different things sort out government regulation that's a conversation we were having earlier we can use digital twins especially of water factories and utility plants especially to actually analyse and optimise water utilities but we also have augmented reality so increasingly if we have a look at the aviation sector. Yeah. You go up to a Boeing aircraft, you don't pull up a manual any longer. You use artificial intelligence to diagnose the problem using predictive maintenance.
33:09 And then augmented reality simply tells you exactly what to switch out with what. So when we actually think about how we apply some of these newer technologies basically to what is a millennia old industry and trade, there's lots of opportunities. Now, as an entrepreneur basically the plumbing industry basically is worth $9 billion today I can use artificial intelligence in about 10 minutes have a website built I can have an e-commerce site built I can analyse all of you I can understand the competitive dynamics across the UK basically of the entire industry And then as an entrepreneur I can start picking my battles.
33:59 A 9 billion pound industry is quite interesting from an entrepreneurial perspective.
Chapter 14: The circular water economy
34:07 We also are increasingly returning back to nature. So when we think about filtering out all of the junk basically from our rivers, we're using reed beds. We're using different plants different biomes and biospheres. And then when we think about a circular shall we say water economy bearing in mind that water is already its own water cycle in Singapore at the moment basically they reclaim and recycle and reuse 40% of all consumer water. They want that to be 60% by 2050 in Israel. Israel basically currently recycle and reuse 90% of all of their water.
34:53 In California, they're trying to get to 30%. So, do we have solutions basically to water scarcity?
Chapter 15: Why civilisations really collapse
35:04 Bearing in mind that at a very fundamental level when you have a look at the Aztecs, when you have the look at the Mayans, those civilisations collapsed not because AI Terminator robots basically went through the Mayan temples. Those civilisations collapsed because the water courses that they relied on, the rivers they relied on either dried up or changed. The fact of the matter is without water there is no life on this planet, just look at Mars, and without water there is no civilisation.
35:46 So ultimately from an industry and trade perspective, when you're actually helping someone with their plumbing, you're enforcing a United Nations human right. You are making sure that the right water gets to the right place at the right time. And you are fundamentally helping people survive and live and thrive in whatever area they are actually in. That's all you're doing. So, as an industry, there's a huge amount of opportunity ahead of you, a technological opportunity.
36:30 When we have a look at training, it's encouraging to see so many new people coming into the workforce, but don't stand still. And that's it from me. So, thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed that. It was lovely talking with you. Thank you.
Chapter 16: Questions and answers
Answer to a point from the audience on using sea water to flush toilets, as Hong Kong does
38:18 It's things like that you know where you're diverting for example fresh water and actually redirecting that to salt water you know albeit then sort of processing and everything else. Yeah, that's another very intelligent use and I didn't know that and I work with the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. So I'm going to mention that to them. See if they know. That's it. But again, it's a different kind of thinking, isn't it?
38:46 You know, why are you know, why aren't we using grey water or brown water to flush toilets, for example? And you know, some new builds we kind of we think about it, but certainly not salt water.
Answer to a question on how Google's closed-loop data centre in Texas works, and whether others will follow
39:25 So the way it works basically is essentially this hyperscale data centre has got 2,000 GPUs. So you can essentially just like a regular data centre just huge numbers of racks. What we've done basically is we use liquid cooling. So we use liquid cooling to cool the GPUs and computer systems and everything else but it's all closed loop. That's it. So from companies like Xylem and these sorts of things, it's perfectly closed loop. You never need to bring water in from the outside. So you push water over the actual servers.
39:57 So ironically, if you put an actual computer server into water, yeah, it sounds counterintuitive because it's electrical equipment, you know, and any plumber basically and any electrician knows basically that the two should never meet, but you can actually submerge computing equipment, most computing equipment in liquid cooling systems and it's highly efficient. So all you're doing is then you have a radiator. Yeah. So you're taking heat out of the data centre racks and then you're cooling it. So you have a lot of external cooling into the Earth's atmosphere. So that's kind of the next problem to solve or you can push that into the ground. But it's closed loop. Now from a data centre perspective, we've seen the second is planned for New York, but Google's first waterless data centre was the first and it's the only operational one at the moment because it this is sort of about 4 months old now. But from a cooling perspective they've been trying so for example in China as well as the United States also trying to cool data centres actually down at the bottom of the sea. Yeah. And then we've got other data centres basically in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, etc. from a cooling perspective. But the closed loop water cooling system that Google have actually developed that looks like that will be pushed out basically to other data centres. So AI data centres
41:18 when it comes to electricity use, cooling and everything else, there's stories there, but we have a couple of solutions on the truck now and they are operational.
Answer to a follow-up question on whether closed-loop data centres cost more
41:32 So they are they increase the capital expenditure by about 2% which on data centre is large. However, when you have a look at the ROI, it reduces the ROI because you don't need as much water treatment. You don't need to bring water in. So it's cheaper to operate. Yeah. You know, from a community perspective, you know, a lot of communities are saying, "We don't want a data centre in our backyard because, you know, they're gigantic buildings. We don't like the look of them." They're using huge amounts of electricity and they're putting our prices up. Oh, and they're siphoning off huge amounts of water from local communities. So, companies like Google are sort of taking all of those and going, "How do we make all of those problems go away except for the actual look of the data centre?" And they sort of go, "Well, that's what it looks like." Yeah, we'll put some trees up.
Answer to a question on whether data centres could be put in space
43:00 So, the quick answer is yes. A little bit more of a detailed answer is the current SpaceX Falcon Heavy, which is the big rocket. Basically when that actually successfully launches, you know, when it's usable, that will take the cost of launching a kilogram of stuff into space down to $30, bearing in mind that it used to be $10,000 per kilo. So firstly, you've got a very low-cost launch vehicle that can take 250 tons into space. The biggest issue with assembling data centres in space is you need to frankly launch a huge amount of stuff. When you have a look at a hyperscale data centre in space you'd need something like a thousand launches. Now from an economic perspective, if you have a 1 gigawatt AI data centre on Earth then companies like Meta, Google, Nvidia, etc. Microsoft will spend about $30 billion building that data centre out. We estimate that a gigawatt of data centres in space would cost about a billion dollars with the new launch dynamics. From a radiative cooling perspective, you use something called near infrared radiative cooling. So you have computer chips generating a huge amount of heat and they just radiate it into space. But you need solar panels and you need computing gear that radiates heat differently to the systems that we use on Earth. So we need to re-engineer them a little bit.
44:39 So it is feasible to put them up there. The second problem that we actually have is you need to use what we call free space optics to connect the data centres together in orbit. So that's essentially using laser links basically to transfer data between the different data centres. But then you also need a laser link down to Earth because if you imagine so for example we're generating about a zettabyte's worth of information just on health per year and it's all very well having a giant data centre in space but if you can't get information to and from it quickly with low latency it's floating it's just floating around useless. So data centres in space, yes, you need a huge amount of launch capacity. But it can work. But then it relies on the amount of data upload and down upload and down link that you can actually provide.
Answer to a question on why billions of people still lack clean water and sanitation
46:12 So, when it comes to being able to provide people with clean water at a very local level, at a sort of at a dwelling level, we can extract water from the Earth's atmosphere. We can do that using a variety of different technologies, but you need the capital to buy these things. So, on the one hand, you've got the capital problem. When we talk about building out infrastructure so this year we're spending about $3 trillion building out infrastructure in terms of water you know so water utilities electricity systems and everything else the biggest issue that the vast majority of people around the planet actually have are two billion people roughly take part in the informal economy. If you want to provide water basically to a slum in Soweto basically or you know out of Delhi or whatever it happens to be the fact is basically that you need piping. Yeah. You need distribution and water treatment centres you know and we're building those but they're highly capital intensive and at the moment you've got relatively high global interest rates, high inflation. The return on investment for investors basically isn't particularly there. So what we're seeing is we're seeing the Chinese government especially providing a huge amount of 0% financing to sort of Belt and Road initiatives. So on the one hand you've got the problem of 3 billion people without access to clean
47:40 water. You know we need water treatment plants, desalination plants, pipes, infrastructure and everything else and then the people to actually build it and do it. At a local level we can provide things you know so we're doing that sort of throughout Africa to a different degree but then on top of that a lot of the companies that want to build these you know build the water infrastructure they charge a lot of money and they don't transfer the IP. So basically we talk about you know developed nations actually doing technology transfers so that local indigenous populations can actually build things cheaper and frankly basically if you're a gigantic organisation why do you want to give your valuable IP away for free so again that's sort of where I sort of said earlier you know we have solutions to all of these different things but the reason basically why we still have a lot of these problems is because of either investment or will every year we're spending $2.1 trillion now on weapons and armaments you know I've always postulated you know while the world will always want to buy military arms and stuff. What happens basically when you start diverting $500 billion of arms dealers of arms and weapons purchases to say, you know, providing drinking water, you know, you'd move the dial. You know, you'd end up with corruption and bits and bobs.
49:06 Well, you move the dial. So, the reason why we have three billion people on the planet, basically, who don't have access to safe drinking water isn't because we can't do it. It's because who's paying for it and who would do it? But this is a lot of the global challenge comes down to the fact that the weather is changing. I mean, we've seen that today. I mean, you know, tomorrow might be the hottest day in the UK ever at 40.3° C. So, the weather is changing and this is kind of the other problem. You know when we have a look at California with the droughts, Lake Mead got so low basically that California was one metre's worth of water away from not being able to generate 50% of its electricity.
49:50 So you've got these compounding issues but you know do we have a solution? You know could I provide clean water to 100 million people? Yes. Give me the money. I'll figure out how to do that. Just write me a cheque.
Answer to a question on dual use, such as pairing data centres with agriculture
50:49 Well, absolutely. But this is sort of where you know when you actually cohabit. So another example is we take from the energy industry we take the waste heat basically from the data centres and we pipe them to local community swimming pools to heat the swimming pools. That's it. So when you have a look at dual use absolutely but that just requires people to sort of go why don't we do that and put that together and people go why and you go well because of this and here's the business case and this one goes that sounds a good idea and they do it and off we go.
Answer to a question on whether the global north will give the global south what it needs
52:36 No I do not think the global north is going to give the global south what it needs. However when we have a look at climate change European and Chinese CO2 emissions are now dropping. But realistically, are they getting what they need when they need it? Are they getting the help? No. They are getting talk and they are getting limited assistance. So my answer is no.
