Climate Financing for Water Security

The Problem

Climate change is threatening water security globally. Today, two billion people live with chronic high water stress, and four billion experience water stress at least one month a year. Almost a billion people do not have access to safe, clean drinking water. Dry places are becoming drier, with droughts driving crop failure, livestock death and displacement. Wet places are becoming wetter - with flooding destroying communities and contaminating drinking water supplies. The UN projects that water insecurity could displace at least 700 million people by 2030, a potentially massive humanitarian crisis.

However, most of the time, there is still an ample supply of water. The challenge has been installing and maintaining water pumps and water treatment systems that function reliably for communities. While rich countries highly subsidize drinking water utilities, the poorest communities in the world are often left with equipment installed using donor funding that ends after a few years. 

There are no quick technological or bureaucratic fixes to changing rainfall patterns and water availability. It is likely that these extremes will continue to worsen. Instead, sub-national, national and international communities must be motivated to find economic, policy, and political solutions to increase and maintain water security. Status-quo approaches to international development funding, embodied by foreign aid contracts and grant-making mechanisms, are insufficient to achieve lasting global water security. The amount of funding and the contractual modalities applied in its allocation are not proportional to the scale of the challenges nor reflective of the reparations that are arguably an ethical imperative to address the climate damage caused by high-income countries on low-income communities.

Climate Financed Water Protection

Dedicated climate financing for loss and damage, sourced from national governments, inter-government agencies and, to an increasing extent, U.S. corporations' environment, social and governance (ESG) "net zero" commitments, provide an opportunity to switch capital into a climate reparative infrastructure. This includes reliable, sustainable and affordable water supplies. The Mortenson Center team has innovated and brought to scale the methodologies and technologies needed to unlock climate finance for water security.

In 2007, members of the Mortenson Center team led the development and implementation of the first-ever United Nations Clean Development Mechanism program, earning carbon credits for water delivery, followed in 2010 by the first-ever Gold Standard voluntary program. Through these programs, tens of millions of dollars of private financing was leveraged to deliver household water filters to millions of people in Rwanda and Kenya, with revenue from carbon credits largely plowed back into education, repairs and replacements, resulting in significant health, economic and environmental benefits.

The Mortenson Center's Drought Resilience Impact Platform (DRIP) in Kenya and Ethiopia is one of several at-scale efforts led by the team to improve water security through technology and climate finance. The Mortenson Center is also a partner in the Rwanda Amazi Meza program, where climate change accelerated flooding impairs water quality for communities. 

Demonstrated Impact

Most water services in rural, low-income communities are provided with one-off infrastructure installations funded by national and international donors. Low-income communities do not have the financial resources to pay the full cost of water services (while high-income countries largely subsidize water for their citizens). As a result, roughly half of the water systems in these communities fail within a few years. 

Disrupting this status quo, our team developed sensor and analytical technologies designed to continuously monitor water services. We also developed the first-ever methodologies and projects to earn carbon credits from drinking water treatment, reaching millions of people in Kenya and Rwanda with water treatment technologies and operations services, paid for with climate finance. Now, supported by USAID, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the World Bank, the Moore Foundation and the Autodesk Foundation, we are combining these technologies and methodologies to create the first global portfolio of nature-based carbon credit financing for drinking water protection for millions of people. 

The water filtration technologies reduce both the use and demand for firewood to boil water, and will generate carbon credits as revenue to provide on-going water services. The treatment systems include sensor technologies and analytics that allow for remote support for operation and maintenance, and provide the digital auditing trail for the carbon credits. 

Our team is already supporting the water supplies of over four million people in East Africa. Working with key stakeholders, including USAID, NASA, the World Bank, UNICEF, the Millennium Water Alliance, and the Kenya National Drought Management Authority we are forecasting water demand and responding with expanded water system operations and repairs. 

Previous programs run by the Mortenson Center leadership reached millions of people with water treatment services in Kenya and Rwanda, using private financing and unlocking over $100 million of carbon credit revenue to provide on-going water treatment for communities and households. An independent experimental and randomized controlled trial by Emory University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was published in 2019 and showed that among children under five years of age, the program reduced diarrhea by 29% and acute respiratory infection by 25%, saving hundreds of lives. 

Over the next few years, the team will reach an additional two million children in Rwanda with institutional-based water treatment systems across over 1,000 schools. 

Our Team

CU Boulder and our partners are already scaling existing efforts within water-stressed areas in the region, and will leverage this experience to accelerate our impact.

The Mortenson Center in Global Engineering & Resilience at CU Boulder combines education, research, and partnerships to positively impact vulnerable people and their environment by improving development tools and practice. The Center has successfully designed and deployed sensors that monitor and enable maintenance of water systems for over 3 million people yearly in the Horn of Africa. The team has designed and managed a $25 million water and energy intervention in Rwanda.

Within the Mortenson Center, our USAID Sustainable Wash Systems Learning Partnership leads a $15.3 million, four-country, multi-partner study to identify the institutional and governance conditions that result in effective improvements of complex water and sanitation systems in this region.

The Sustainability Innovation Lab at Colorado (SILC) is an interdisciplinary and solution-oriented center that supports diverse projects and educational programs linked by a common focus on issues in sustainability and the environment.

The Millennium Water Alliance (MWA) will leverage expertise at convening partnerships between government actors, NGOs and private sector partners to coordinate our work on the ground in the three countries. MWA currently leads a $35 million program with over 20 private, NGO, and government partners in five arid counties of northern Kenya. MWA is also convening a five-year program in Ethiopia focused on the use of systems strengthening and facilitation approaches to strengthen water and sanitation systems district-wide for improved service delivery. MWA members, including CARE, IRC WASH, World Vision, Food for the Hungry and Catholic Relief Services, have long-term relationships with community, government, other local stakeholders, and extensive expertise working on water services and land planning and management in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.

DRIP will provide direct support to our local government partners in the arid regions of Kenya, Somaliland and Ethiopia, operating through national level partnerships with the Ethiopian Ministry of Water, Irrigation and Energy, the Somaliland State Ministry of Water Resources Development and the Kenya National Drought Management Authority.