Water infrastructure is big business
American cities will need to invest more than $250 billion to update their water systems in the next 20 years. Steve Henn reports private equity investors and major corporations have notice of the water business.
Irrigation water near Bakersfield, Calif. (David McNew/Getty Images)
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Bob Moon: The United Nations is playing host to an international conference on Water Resource Management today. Speakers at the two day event include U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon as well as executives from some of the world's biggest conglomerates, including GE and Siemens.
As Marketplace's Steve Henn reports, water and water infrastructure have quickly become very, very big business.
Steve Henn: In the next 20 years, American cities will need to invest more than $250 billion to update their water systems. And infrastructure needs in the U.S. are just one piece of an enormous global water market.
Private equity investors and major corporations have taken notice:
Kathy Shandling: What we are talking about is trillions of dollars.
Kathy Shandling is the executive director of the International Private Water Association. Her group believes private investment is the only way to bring clean water to the masses.
But Wenonah Hauter at Food and Water Watch says many advances being pushed by corporate titans are impractical in the developing world.
Wenonah Hauter: Our concern is that the wrong technologies are going to be selected and that they're gonna cost more than they should.
Right now, roughly 1 billion people don't have access to clean drinking water. And more than twice that number don't have water for sanitation.
In Washington, I'm Steve Henn for Marketplace.
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From Los Angeles, CA, 07/23/2008
There is no shortage of fresh water in the world. It is unevenly distributed, often wasted, and poorly managed governments. Like the energy crisis, where we are too heavily dependent on fossil fuels for our energy needs, so to do we depend on archaic water schemes that have worked in the past but today pose danger to the environment and provide centralized targets for terrorists. We need to decentralized our energy and water infrastructure, and achieve a creative balance to sustain us into the future. For water, large scale water transfers using advanced marine technology systems and desalination point a way to a more secure and humane future.
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