Water Is the Crisis: From Floods to Drought to the Finance Gap
About the session
For most people on earth, climate change does not arrive as a temperature projection or a policy debate. It arrives as water.
Too much, too suddenly: floods that destroy crops, contaminate drinking sources, and overwhelm sanitation systems.
Too little, too long: droughts that hollow out livelihoods, force migration, and strain the irrigation systems smallholder farmers depend on.
Too dirty, too consistently: contaminated water that drives preventable disease, affects children's development, and adds pressure to already stretched health systems.
Water is the connective tissue between climate change and human survival. It links food systems, public health, urban resilience, sanitation, energy, ecosystems, livelihoods, and conflict.
Yet despite its centrality, water can remain strangely peripheral to the conversations happening around it. Climate finance discussions do not always treat water as core infrastructure. Health conversations can approach contamination primarily as a disease problem. Agricultural conversations address drought while overlooking irrigation. And people working on different parts of the water system are often separated by sector, discipline, and funding stream.
Part of the problem is that water does not fit neatly anywhere.
Watershed protection is simultaneously a conservation, water security, and agricultural question. Urban sanitation sits across public health, infrastructure, and climate adaptation. Small-scale irrigation affects agricultural productivity, poverty, and climate resilience. Water crosses many of the boundaries our institutions use to organize themselves, and can fall through the gaps between them.
There is a financing problem too. Utilities and local institutions responsible for delivering water infrastructure do not always have the financial structures or access required to absorb climate adaptation capital. Funding can consequently remain concentrated in projects and pilots rather than strengthening the systems expected to withstand decades of climate pressure. Meanwhile, the communities most exposed to water insecurity, from smallholder farmers to informal urban settlements and remote communities, can be the furthest from the financing and governance systems deciding what gets built.
This session will treat water as what it is: a defining climate infrastructure challenge of the next decade.
It will bring together people working across sanitation, irrigation, watershed finance, rural water access, urban utilities, and community resilience to ask what it would take to build water systems capable of absorbing climate shocks rather than collapsing under them.
And underneath that sits a more provocative question: if water is already how so many people experience climate change, why does it keep getting left out of the rooms where the response is being designed?
Discussion Group Leaders
Lindsay Stradley is Co-Founder & Executive Director at Sanergy & Fresh Life, expanding access to safe and sustainable urban sanitation services through partnerships with local governments.
Martin Fisher is Co-Founder & CEO at KickStart International, advancing small-scale irrigation solutions that help farming families across Africa increase incomes and build sustainable livelihoods.
Minhaj Chowdhury is Cofounder and CEO at Drinkwell, expanding safe water access at scale through public utility partnerships and sustainable water infrastructure.
Nadia Kist is Executive Director at Blood:Water, advancing African-led solutions to health disparities at the intersection of HIV and safe water, sanitation, and hygiene.
What to expect
A cross-sector working conversation moving between ground-level experience and systems-level challenges.
Participants will bring perspectives from sanitation, irrigation, watershed protection, rural infrastructure, urban utilities, climate finance, and community resilience to examine where water keeps falling through the gaps and what needs to change in financing, governance, and institutional design to close them.
The session will deliberately connect people who rarely share a room, looking for connections between problems that are often addressed separately but are, in practice, part of the same water system.
Who this is for
This session is for water and WASH practitioners, climate adaptation specialists, conservation funders and investors, public health leaders, urban infrastructure professionals, agricultural development organizations, community resilience practitioners, and anyone who has watched water disappear from climate conversations it should be anchoring.
What you will get out of it
A framework for understanding water as the connective tissue between climate, health, food, sanitation, ecosystems, and urban resilience
Practical perspectives on connecting watershed protection and water infrastructure with the finance needed to take them to scale
Ground-level experience of irrigation and rural water systems as climate adaptation infrastructure
Insight into why sanitation and water access can fall between conventional climate finance categories
A clearer sense of who needs to be in the room together to make water a serious part of the climate response