In this episode, Sarah Johnson sits down with Andrea Erickson-Quiroz, Global Director for Water Security and Deputy Managing Director for the Food and Water Systems Priority at the Nature Conservancy, to discuss how the organization is addressing what many experts describe as a “looming global water crisis”.
About Our Guest
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz is the Global Director for Water Security and Deputy Managing Director for the Food and Water Systems Priority for The Nature Conservancy. Andrea is working to scale solutions that address water scarcity and watershed degradation that impact nature and people, working with over 200 water professionals in over 15 countries. Andrea works with global private and public partnerships to change practices and policies that lead to improved water security by deploying nature-based solutions and increasing the health of ecological systems. She is a governor for the World Water Council, and serves in an advisory capacity to Anheuser-Busch and the CEO Water Mandate.
Andrea has over 25 years of experience in designing conservation strategies, organizational development and leadership at a field level in Latin America and the US, as well as now as a senior global executive at The Nature Conservancy. Her projects have included watershed scale implementation, policy reform and sector engagements in water, agriculture and energy development. She completed her undergraduate degree at Cornell University and has a Masters degree from the University of Cambridge in Environmental Policy and Economic Development.
Transcript
Andrea Erickson Quiroz (00:01):
Either we’ve lost like 80% of global wetlands over time, and we certainly have a loss of biodiversity in freshwater systems.
Sarah Johnson (00:09):
UN water estimates that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries with absolute water scarcity.
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz (00:14):
It’s one of those things where we see deforestation together with climate, creating more variable water. And in many places you’ll see less water because of loss of forest habitat. And that sounds really bad, like, oh my God, that sounds like a really bad and sorrowful statistic. And it kind of is. But look at it from the bright side. That means, oh, well, we could fix that. That’s a thing that we can work on together.
Sarah Johnson (00:38) :
Welcome to the Pathway Podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Johnson, and thank you for joining us for this episode. Our guest today is Andrea Erickson-Quiroz, Global director for water security and deputy managing director for the Food and Water Systems Priority for the Nature Conservancy. Andrea, it’s such a pleasure to have you on today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz (01:00):
Thank you, Sarah, I’m so glad to be here.
Sarah Johnson (01:02):
Can you start us off by telling us a bit about your current role as Global director for water security at The Nature Conservancy?
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz (01:09 ):
Sure. First of all, The Nature Conservancy is an organization that’s working hard to address the crisis of biodiversity loss and climate change and how they impact us in our lives, in our communities. So my role is, as the lead for water security, to think about how nature connects with our needs as humans. How we use it in agriculture, in our cities and industries, in our homes, and also for energy development. And in general, our idea is that we can protect nature and we should for all of its inherent benefits, but to really protect the planet and support lively communities and people like ourselves every day, we do need to transform our food and water systems to make them more regenerative and positive.
(01:51):
So with that sort of central premise that nature has a very important role in solving for global challenges, my role is to connect and convene with a lot of external stakeholders to make sure that we’re joining forces, finding common ground around issues of nature and water security. So that might be with major corporations, or it may be with UN agencies or with governments that are obviously concerned with the livelihoods of people. And it also could be with farmers in local communities that I get an opportunity to meet and hear what are their challenges and how can we work together. So it’s a pretty exciting perch on which to see the world. It’s a long commute, so I spent a lot of time on zoom calls and as much as possible, being out in the field, seeing all the very, very hopeful stories that are out there.
Sarah Johnson (02:38) :
Her projects have included watershed scale implementation, policy reform and sector engagements in water, agriculture and energy development.
Sarah Johnson (02:48):
Thank you so much for sharing more on that, Andrea. So my next question for you is – the Nature Conservancy promotes this concept of investing in nature-based solutions- which you’ve alluded to in the description of your role- to meet global water needs. Can you elaborate on what these are, these nature-based solutions, and give us examples of the Conservancy’s investments in regions around the world?
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz (03:08):
Sure I can. So nature-based solutions is really just a way of directing our attention to the kinds of things that are happening already today in nature. So forests, for example, or grasslands, will filter water. Wetlands can capture water and clean it and hold it for storage. Soils- healthy soils- can capture water as well, and prevent it from running off too quickly. And so these lands around rivers and lakes and wetlands are what we call watersheds. Nature is out there every day cleaning and holding that water for us so that when we need it in the quantity and quality that we need it, it’s available to us. That’s what we call generally nature-based solutions. We looked at this a couple of years ago.
(03:53):
In 2017, we published a report called Beyond the Source, and in it we looked at over 4000 cities globally. And we asked the question, what could we do if we improved watersheds, if we had better forest protection or better agricultural practices on lands, or had better riparian buffer strips that kept water from flowing into streams that had not been filtered. What we found is, in about a thousand cities, we could actually help cities deliver better water quality and quantity at a more efficient cost basis, meaning they could spend money on their watersheds and actually provide water for people cheaper than if they didn’t do that.
(04:34):
It’s a really simple concept of an ounce of prevention, pound of cure. But in so doing that, they would be investing in biodiversity conservation in places like forests or grasslands. They would be investing in rural communities, in agriculture, they would be doing things that are beneficial for the climate -so many other benefits that come from investing in watersheds at the same time. So we work in a lot of different places on different approaches because the approaches are always going to be really different place by place. A couple of places, like in the United States, the Colorado River, working on large basin management, the Mississippi River, we’re working in agriculture.
(05:10):
In Nairobi, Kenya, working very hard in the upper watersheds of the upper Tana River that supplies Nairobi with a majority of its water, 90% of its water. And that’s in agriculture. Working with tea growers and vegetable growers up there. It could be protecting really big wetlands like in Gabon and places where they have just phenomenal wetland systems and river systems. All of those are just different approaches of getting at- how can we harness really the power of nature to improve water security for people through any one of these different pathways? And the cool thing about it is there’s really some great stories out there of how it’s working. The tough thing about it is how do you actually get people going at a local level to pull together these practices that will help them solve for water security challenges?
Sarah Johnson (05:56):
In your work you also talk about the relationship between sound land management practices and more reliable water flow. So what land management practices have you seen that have successfully contributed to more reliable water sources for communities that are at risk?
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz (06:10):
Yeah, so there’s a great story of Quito, Ecuador- it was one of the first water funds that the Nature Conservancy started, and that is now a 15 or almost 20 year old water fund. That was really in large part because there were challenges and water flow coming into the city of Quito. Up in the upper watershed, there’s these wonderful high, high alpine grasslands that hold water back. And they were being changed. They were being used and over time degraded. So there was an effort to protect those areas up in that watershed. And that would help the city of Quito have more regular flow. And it’s a really great story, because they have an internal rate of return that they have figured out for the city of Quito, that’s 7.1% or something like that, which is actually pretty phenomenal. To see the positive rate of return.
(06:58):
But I think you started at the top of this conversation talking about Cape Town. And that’s just a phenomenal story as well, where the city of Cape Town is, as you mentioned in 2018, had to restrict water really drastically because of this day zero event, which they thought their reservoirs would be so low. Basically no water would be flowing. This is a city of 5 million people. If you can imagine turning off the water taps to people’s homes and 5 million people, that brought a lot of focus to the problem. And really, at that hour, at the hour of day zero, it’s pretty hard to solve it. But fortunately, for some time prior to that, the City of Cape Town and the Nature Conservancy, some corporations and others had been looking at how you could restore the natural native ecosystem outside of Cape Town. If you can imagine, it’s a stunningly beautiful landscape. The natural ecosystem is a little bit like what we see in Southern California, and it’s a mediterranean scrub kind of ecosystem. But I’d have to say in Cape Town it’s with all of the biodiversity, the plant species there. It’s just incredibly beautiful, if I can say, even more beautiful than Southern California.
(08:05):
But what had happened over time is there were these invasive trees- pine trees that had been or evergreen trees – that had been released from plantations and, you know, naturally released. They had just grown and grown and suddenly there was millions of acres of these pine trees, and all of those trees were sucking water out of the system. They were not native there. And they had completely overgrowing the hillsides around Cape Town. And so the scientists there with the Nature Conservancy and many other researchers worked out that if we could very selectively target to take out those invasive species, like literally go out there, cut them down and remove them from those watersheds, we could restore two months of water to the city of Cape Town, 55 billion liters of water. That’s two months of water supply that could be done for a cost of around $25 million, or about a 10th of the cost of a desal plant.
(09:01):
So imagine, day zero, as things were looming, the idea that they could restore their biodiversity, their ecosystem returned two months of water, which would have been so precious at that moment in time, at a 10th of the cost of the next best option. And it really got the city galvanized and many others galvanized. And so it’s such a great story because it’s not only like, oh, maybe someday we could get that done. But they set a series of goals of how much land had to be restored, and that meant going out and cutting down trees and doing all the work it takes. It’s very labor intensive, creates lots of jobs, like 800 jobs.
(09:36):
They targeted young people and women from areas that didn’t have a lot of job opportunities. We’re already halfway there in terms of the goals of restoration. So they wanted to do 130,000 acres more or less, and it’s over 50% done. So this is a reality. This restoration is happening. And that water will be restored to the city of Cape Town. Now the City of Cape Town has to do other things as well. This isn’t going to be the only solution that they need on the table, but what a great triple bottom line of ecosystem benefit, water benefit, jobs benefit to the communities around there.
Sarah Johnson (10:08):
She completed her undergraduate degree at Cornell University and also has a masters from the University of Cambridge in Environmental policy and economic development.
Sarah Johnson (10:18):
Absolutely. And this is something that sounds like it can be replicated in other similar communities with invasive species or what have you.
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz (10:26 ):
Absolutely. I mean, every different, every different watershed is different. In some places it might be invasive species. Boy, that’s a big problem that we have on the Colorado River. The tamarisk and Russian olive removal processes there, I think are really important. But in some other places, the land management practices we need might be restoring a forest. We might need to put trees back in, or places where the trees were a natural part of that ecosystem, and we actually need to go back and restore those forests. And that’s also possible to do in concert or together with agricultural communities, who may also really have places that they could do agroforestry and mix together agricultural and forestry operations together. It could be that we’re going to protect new freshwater ecosystems, or we’re going to protect a forest that’s at the high end of a watershed and that sort of mixed approach of land management.
(11:20):
A great example of that is the city of New York actually is one of the original ideas of this sort of integrating watershed management to city water supply. And this was a program that started in 1993 when the EPA in the United States said to the city of New York, gosh, you know, your water isn’t as clean as it used to be. It needs filtering now. You have to treat it additionally, and it’s going to cost you, the city of New York, about $8 billion to put in that filtration plant. And they said, well, look, you know, what about if we go up to the Catskills, where our water comes from and we try to solve the problem at the source. Again, ounce of prevention, pound of cure, right.
(11:59):
And so now, 25, 26 years later, they still haven’t had to build that $8 billion filtration plant. They have invested something in the order of $2.5 billion, vested or committed towards the watershed. And some of that is in agriculture, over 400 farms. They’ve been investing in things on farms, with farms and farm families to do better nutrient management. There’s a lot of dairy farming up there. There’s also protection that’s happened. There’s been acquisitions of land for forest, for the state of New York or local counties. There’s been conservation easements that leaves ownership with private landowners but prevents further subdivision.
(12:39):
And they’ve opened up about 135,000 acres of open space or recreation space for people to be able to benefit. So here we are, 26 years later. It still hasn’t cost even a half of what it would have cost for the filtration plant. There’s all these other benefits that have happened, and so you can see the land management of protection and on farm stuff is very different than what we’re doing in Cape Town. But that’s the kind of, the beauty of this, if you will, is that it’s always going to be a local solution to solving those problems. But we find this formula of putting together upstream communities and downstream communities is really replicable. And we’ve done 46 of these water funds globally, and we continue to work with partners and communities in other ways as well, to replicate this basic sort of model.
Sarah Johnson (13:23):
That’s wonderful. And also to hear about the cost savings in investing in nature-based solutions. So my next question actually asks you to elaborate a little further on the Nature Conservancy’s work in cities around the world to create water funds. Can you tell us more about what those are specifically and give us examples in different communities around the world?
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz (13:41):
Sure. So a water fund is a what we call like a collective action platform, if you will, or effort. Nobody can solve for water problems by themselves. Your water always comes from somewhere and your water goes someplace else. So if you’re going to solve for water, you really have to pull together lots of different actors against different jurisdictions and different sectors. It might be tribal, it might be agriculturalists, it might be cities, it might be industry. But, you know, you have to bring them all together. And what we try to do is set up a science based plan for how to resolve the water problems, and really looking deeply at how to change how water is flowing through the system, using nature-based solutions or other solutions that might be necessary.
(14:25):
There’s a governance which is going to be different in every place, but like, how are we going to operate together? Will we be a separate new organization, an NGO? Will it be part of a county organization or how will it function? So you have to think about how are we going to actually meet together. We do pretty extensive work on that economic case. Like who will benefit? How will they benefit? Why is this a good thing to do? Because people have questions about that. It’s really important to answer to stakeholders why this is an important thing to do and what they will get out of it. Last, you have to figure out how to fund it.
(14:58):
So, you know, the case that we’ve talked about, which was Cape Town, was one of those 46 water funds that we have helped start, but we have done many in Latin America, in Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Santiago de Chile, Quito, Ecuador. I mentioned that case before. Started some in China. We’re actually working on one in the United Kingdom where, believe it or not, they have a problem with water scarcity. Who would ever believe that the United Kingdom would start to have troubles with water scarcity? But that’s such a big and growing issue there. The approach is the same. We have worked through it so many times, we sort of have that sense of like how to help people through that process. But then, as I mentioned earlier, the answers to all those questions of what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? Who should be at this table, you know, who will benefit and how much will this cost? How will we pay for it? All those answers are going to be very local, and it’s important that it is very local and inclusive. It’s not a top down kind of thing you can do.
(15:58):
We’re starting to see that we can do more by trying to be quite so involved ourselves, you know, sort of at the table, boots on the ground in every single situation. We certainly are when it seems like it’s a good fit for us and we have a very strong role to play. But we’re also working through what we call the nature for water facility, and that is just what we hope is a very nice name for a technical assistance window, where we can support other communities where it’s really just about sort of part of the kind of the very critical technical parts of that story. And we’re finding development banks, corporations and a number of local communities have been really glad to be able to have access to our services. And then they carry on with their journey and with not as much participation from us.
(16:44):
And those general watershed investment programs can be very large scale basins, but they’re often in smaller scale basins where relationships and governments and people are connected over smaller ecosystem or smaller watersheds. And so a big part of the story for me is also how you see those connections growing between people and utility leaders or corporations of a large city like Nairobi get connected through this mechanism to small farmers in the upper watershed, women farmers, people in those communities, and they find value together. And it’s that sharing of the mutual value that really makes this, I think, a very special approach to solving for water security.
Sarah Johnson (17:28):
Thank you so much for sharing that, Andrea. Now, if we can switch gears to talk about the big picture. I want to ask you, based on the Nature Conservancy’s research, what are the anticipated effects of climate change and the current rates of global deforestation on our future water supply? And as a follow up to that, if you could also speak to what impacts we’ve already seen in the last 50 to 100 years.
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz (17:48):
Yeah. So here’s the good news and the bad news. Let’s go with the bad news first shall we? The bad news is there’s very widespread agreement that the real pain of climate change will be felt in terms of water and heat. We see hot cities. That’s really dangerous heat islands and threatening for people. But the other part of climate change that is very threatening for people is around water, droughts and floods.
(18:16):
And this is such an interesting time to see what’s happening in places that are experiencing both droughts for a couple of years and then massive floods. And that’s not going to really change. That’s the bad news – that these changes in the water cycle, because of the climate warming, is going to create more variability across the globe.
(18:35):
What the emerging science is right now, and it’s just emerging, so I’m sure things will become clearer over time, is that the water cycle that we think of locally like, hey, it gets water that comes off the ocean, and then it hits our mountains, and then it drops water and flows back to the ocean. We think about this nice sort of circuit of water that might happen locally. What we’re realizing is those water cycles are like big conveyor belts that are connected across the globe.
(19:02):
As things are changing in the Amazon, for example, and we’re losing forests in the Amazon, and that will then create less vapor in the atmosphere, because those forests are just putting up huge amounts of water into what they call these atmospheric rivers. That goes down as we deforest more and more of the Amazon. There’s less and less water up in that water cycle, which then now doesn’t just impact Brazil, it will have global impacts as they are all connected over time. And so it’s one of those things where we see deforestation together with climate, creating more variable water. And in many places you’ll see less water because of loss of forest habitat. And then that water, those atmospheric rivers are then now dumping in different places and in severe ways. You’re seeing these massive flooding events even in a place that just suffered years of drought. So that’s the bad news. It’s not sounding very good.
(19:55):
The good news of this is that there are so many things that are really, about humans’ use of water, that is really the most important thing to know. So for example, water scarcity, and you mentioned these statistics, of how many people are living already in water scarce environments where there’s water stress in the system. Half of the people on the planet already live in places with water stress. The severity of that recent statistics is more like 25% are living in severe water-stressed areas. That part is really driven by how we use water and how well do we manage water, and how well do we work together to manage it better? So that’s the hopeful part of this, is this is really mostly about how humans manage water. And we can change that.
Sarah Johnson (20:39):
That’s good news.
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz (20:40) :
It is good news. And so when we think about it, you know, one of the big drivers of water scarcity is agriculture. About 70% to 80% of water consumption is actually in agriculture. And that’s us. That’s us eating our food or growing crops for food and fibers. And so this is not at all about blaming agriculture, but it is an opportunity to think about agriculture as a really important sector to go figure out some changes and how water is impacted. Can we grow things with less water use? Can we start to use less water and the different crops we pick or different practices we have?
(21:17):
Can we support farmers to have better soil health, meaning the actual value of their soil is better because it does better at retaining water. So there’s better moisture for farmers over the long term. But it also holds back nutrients better, so they don’t need to put as much nutrients on the soil, fertilizers and stuff like that, which means there’s less water quality impact. Lots of things that we can do in agriculture to actually start to improve these things right now. And we have pretty big levers there. If we can start to move backwards on those drivers into the water system. Another big one, and it just to me, it still is really just incredible to think about, but 80% of water, wastewater, is discharged without treatment, 80% of it.
Sarah Johnson (22:00):
That’s a lot.
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz (22:01):
That’s a lot. Including in the United States, we have systems that are not able to take on all of the stormwater that we have. And so we have major issues with stormwater management that also is a driver of waste directly into rivers and estuaries and lakes. And so there’s so much room for improvement. I mean, it sounds really bad, like, oh my God, that sounds like a really bad and sorrowful statistic. And it kind of is. But but look at it from the bright side. That means, oh, well, we can fix that. That’s a thing that we can work on together. And so when I see all these big stories about deforestation, climate change, it really does worry me.
(22:39):
I’m out here because I really am for solving these big problems. And then I have to divert back to say, yeah, so much of water issues are entirely within our ability today to solve in terms of technology. It is more an issue of how focused are we? Are we really paying attention to this? Do we have adequate investment going into water systems? I think everybody would say no. Can we find more efficient ways to get at water security? We think we can help a little bit. Right? Nature-based solutions can be a very cost effective way to get a better water security. But we need to do more. That’s not going to be sufficient. That’s for me, the very hopeful story.
(23:18):
Yeah. There’s been a lot of change in ecosystems, ecosystems as the fundamental basis, the fundamental asset for all that we use in water. And we can say to ourselves, but that’s not looking very positive either. We’ve lost like 80% of global wetlands over time, and we certainly have a loss of biodiversity in freshwater systems somewhere in the area of 83%, loss of like total mass of populations that you should see, not this species, but just the numbers of fish and bird life and things like that that you would normally find in ecosystems just has been enormously degraded. But there are also very positive signals about how we can better protect freshwater ecosystems or terrestrial systems, and we can restore them. These are, again, things that are within our power. We just have to decide that it’s time to do it.
Sarah Johnson (24:07):
Absolutely. So on that note, before we let you go, we want to ask or close with the final question around what behavior changes can be made on an individual level, as well as by the private and public sectors, which you’ve spoken to a bit already, to help us meet sustainable development goal six- clean water and sanitation for all.
Andrea Erickson-Quiroz (24:24) :
Well, I’m going to start with those sort of entities out there. You know, the public and private institutions, which always sounds kind of vague, like who might those people be? Right? But those people might be your utility manager. And people that work in water supply are very dedicated people. They are trying very hard to bring us clean water every day, and they need support from whatever their jurisdiction is – from a city, from a county, from a state, from their nation – to have sufficient resources to be able to solve some of the problems here. So there are public institutions out there that are likely underfunded wherever we live. Doesn’t matter if you live in the United States or in Africa, but believe me, it’s far more dire in Africa and other places around the world. One thing that we can think about is how do we really bring this up higher on the agenda so that we are not waiting for a Cape Town, day zero crisis. But we are electing officials and putting in place this public institutions that really have the capacity to think long term and are taking action on that.
(25:32):
There are corporations out there that are really actually trying to do a lot to change the course of the future on water. And we mentioned at the top of the call that I’m on the advisory group for the CEO Water Mandate, and they work with corporations that have put their hand up to say, we really want to do better by our own practices, what we do in our operations. And we also want to invest in our communities, both in sanitation, but also in watershed health. Those corporations may not be doing enough yet. You know, we always think that maybe everybody could do just a little bit more, but at least they have put their hands up to say we acknowledge there is a huge water crisis looming and we want to be part of the solution.
(26:12):
And so there are corporations that we should think and benefit a little bit through our attention to them. There are those corporations that don’t do as well, and we should be really mindful about that when we think about our own consumer dollars. So you can look at places like corporations’ websites to see if they’ve set goals for water. You can look at the CEO Water Mandate and see there who’s joined, what their CEOs are doing, what kind of projects they’re doing. And so I think they will have a huge role over time. Because again, what we talked about earlier, agriculture is such a driver of impact on water. Many of the corporations that are involved in the food supply and the food system can have such an amazing impact if they start thinking about how they’re buying their products and how they’re supporting farmers and transitioning to better regenerative agricultural practices. Big lever if we can pay more attention to that.
(27:06):
I think lastly, coming back to, there’s the public sector – make sure that, you know, we have good people well funded in supplying water and sanitation and pay attention to what corporations and businesses can do. And then on our own, it always feels like, wow, it’s just like everything else. I’m just one person, what can I do? But the awareness of where does your water come from? Do you know where it comes from? And are you aware of what’s happening around your water source? And are there people that are trying to do the right thing? Are you showing up at a city council meeting or a town hall meeting to become engaged and to listen? Or are you asking questions of candidates like, have you paid attention to what our water sources are going to look like in 50 years?
(27:53):
There are places that have a really strong water culture. If you go to San Antonio, Texas, and places like that, they pay attention to their aquifer. They make major investments. And so it’s about culture and everybody paying attention to it and kind of holding others accountable. And then I do find in our home, you start thinking about – where is my water, the hidden water in my world? Well, it’s in the food I eat. It’s probably not what I’m drinking. Nobody should not drink enough water. Everybody should drink enough water and be hopeful that it’s clean and there’s enough of it. But in your food, you might think about your water impact, or your clothing. There’s just places that we as individuals can take a good hard look.
(28:34):
And then lastly, whatever we have and however things are going for us here in our communities, and I’m assuming some of your listeners are in the United States, it’s going a lot worse for people in other places around the world. And so is there room in your pocketbook or in your heart for thinking about how to support people and other communities around the world as they work to really provide for themselves and protect the water around them as well? And there’s so many great organizations working on water. I won’t go down the list, but I’m sure that anybody who wants to think about a little bit could think about a local community group that’s engaged in water supply issues around the world, an organization that’s doing water access, or an organization like The Nature Conservancy that’s thinking about watershed health and freshwater ecosystems. All of the above are wonderful ways to be engaged.
Sarah Johnson (29:23) :
Thank you so much for sharing that, Andrea, and for joining us today. It’s been so fascinating to learn more about your work and the solutions you’re leading at The Nature Conservancy to help at-risk communities secure reliable sources of water. It’s encouraging to hear about some of these solutions, and about how hopeful you are that we can tackle this problem head on if we pay more attention to it and contribute more resources to it, as you mentioned.
(29:48):
To our listeners, also, thank you for tuning in. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Pathway Podcast to get alerts on new episodes featuring thought leaders working in housing, environmental conservation, climate change and water security.