The next global security crisis may not be energy. It may be water

For much of the past half century, governments have worried about energy security. Who controls the oil, who supplies the gas, whether pipelines remain open and what happens when a hostile state decides that an essential commodity can also be a political weapon.

The next strategic vulnerability may be considerably more basic.

Water.

The United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health has warned that the world is entering an era of “water bankruptcy”, in which pressure on rivers, aquifers, wetlands, lakes and other natural systems has become so severe that simply waiting for them to recover to historic conditions is no longer realistic.

The figures explain the concern. Around four billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least one month each year. Some 2.1 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, while drought is estimated to inflict $307 billion of damage annually.

For governments, this is no longer simply an environmental problem. It is an economic and strategic one.

A country without dependable water cannot guarantee food production, industrial output or, ultimately, political stability. Businesses cannot manufacture without it. Farmers cannot grow without it. Cities cannot expand without it.

That increasingly uncomfortable reality is the market that a new infrastructure venture, Mazavida, intends to address.

Launched by Australian entrepreneur Rick Parish alongside American energy executive Ben Morrow, the company is developing rapidly deployable water treatment and desalination systems intended for governments, industry, agriculture and emergency response.

Its proposition is strikingly practical: when a country needs more water, it should not necessarily have to wait years for a vast new infrastructure project to be designed, financed and constructed.

Some of the answer could arrive in a container.

A different approach to infrastructure

Mazavida brings together Parish's Abu Dhabi headquartered Kinetic7 Technologies and Aquarius Capital with PIF Energy and PIF Capital.

Rather than concentrating solely on enormous centralised desalination facilities, its technology is designed around containerised systems capable of treating contaminated and brackish water as well as desalinating seawater.

The units can be deployed according to demand and location, potentially providing additional water capacity to communities, industrial sites, farms and areas where existing infrastructure has been damaged or simply does not exist.

Parish argues that this ability to deploy infrastructure quickly will become increasingly important.

“Water security is no longer a distant development challenge. It is becoming a defining economic, humanitarian and geopolitical risk,” he said.

“Mazavida has been created to move beyond discussion and deliver engineered systems that can produce potable water quickly, reliably and at scale where conventional infrastructure is too slow, too costly or too vulnerable.”

That distinction matters.

Governments have become accustomed to infrastructure projects taking years, sometimes decades, between conception and completion. Planning, financing, procurement and construction can turn urgently needed infrastructure into a generational undertaking.

Water shortages do not necessarily operate according to the same timetable.

Water is becoming an economic asset

There is also a larger investment story developing.

The economic importance of water has historically been obscured by its ubiquity in wealthy countries. Turn on a tap in Britain and, barring the occasional infrastructure failure, water appears. That reliability makes it easy to underestimate the enormous system required to deliver it.

Globally, the assumptions underpinning that system are becoming less comfortable.

Population growth is increasing demand. Agriculture requires enormous quantities of water. Industry needs secure supplies. Ageing networks require investment, while drought and depleted groundwater can place additional pressure on existing resources.

The result is that water security is beginning to occupy some of the territory previously reserved for energy security.

For investors, that could create a substantial infrastructure market. For governments, it raises a more difficult question: how much strategic dependence on vulnerable water systems is acceptable?

Morrow, founder and chief executive of PIF Energy, puts the danger starkly.

“The day is coming when oil will be cheap and wars will be fought over water,” he said.

Whether that prediction proves correct or not, history offers little reason to assume that severe competition for a resource essential to human survival will remain merely an environmental debate.

Energy dependence has repeatedly demonstrated what happens when strategically important resources become concentrated in particular countries, infrastructure or supply routes.

Governments would be foolish to assume water is somehow exempt.

Food security begins with water

Agriculture may provide the clearest illustration.

Food security is impossible without water security. When reliable irrigation disappears, agricultural production becomes vulnerable and countries become more dependent upon imports.

Mazavida therefore intends to pursue agricultural partnerships alongside municipal and industrial projects, supplying water for irrigation as well as human consumption.

This is where the argument becomes particularly relevant to national resilience.

A government capable of securing its own energy, water and food supplies has considerably greater freedom of action than one dependent upon international markets for all three.

Parish describes them as increasingly interconnected.

“Food, energy and water security now sit at the centre of national resilience,” he said. “Clean water is not just a humanitarian issue; it is the foundation for health, productivity, stability and investment.”

The technology will have to prove itself

There are, inevitably, questions that only deployment can answer.

Desalination itself is not new. The challenge has always been making it economical, energy efficient and practical at sufficient scale. Containerising water treatment does not make those fundamental considerations disappear.

Mazavida will therefore ultimately be judged not by the severity of the problem it identifies, but by whether its systems can reliably produce water at a cost governments and businesses are prepared to pay.

The company says its technology will be engineered, manufactured, owned and operated within the PIF Energy and Kinetic7 group of businesses, giving it control over deployment and longer term operation.

If that model works, modular infrastructure could have an important advantage. Instead of attempting to predict precisely how much water capacity will be required decades from now, additional units could potentially be deployed as requirements grow.

That makes the concept particularly interesting for rapidly developing economies and regions where conventional infrastructure investment has failed to keep pace with population or industrial growth.

Mazavida intends initially to target Commonwealth countries and other markets where water dependency is particularly acute.

Its launch comes at an interesting moment.

Western governments have spent the years since the pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine rediscovering an old lesson: efficiency and resilience are not always the same thing.

Long international supply chains are wonderfully economical until they break. Imported energy is convenient until the supplier becomes hostile. Infrastructure that operates close to capacity is efficient until something goes wrong.

Water deserves the same strategic thinking.

The question for governments is therefore moving beyond how to reduce water consumption or manage the next drought. It is whether sufficient infrastructure exists to guarantee supply when established systems fail.

The twentieth century taught governments to think strategically about oil.

The twenty first may force them to do the same with water.