Water: Weaver of Life - Transcript of Opening Remarks by President Tharman Shanmugaratnam at the GAEA Awards Gala Dinner, at the World Economic Forum 2025 in Davos, Switzerland on 23 January 2025

It's more significant than ever that the World Economic Forum and its partners here today are keeping climate action, are keeping all the actions we need to preserve life as we know it, at the forefront of our agenda. It is more important now than ever. Thank you for bringing together these partnerships, particularly the public-private-philanthropic partnerships that are helping to spur innovations on the ground.

“Water: Weaver of Life” has an obvious meaning. We know water has a critical role in the whole fabric of our lives. But there's also a less visible but equally powerful meaning, when we say water is the weaver of life. Because water is also woven, unfortunately, into climate change and into the growing degradation of biodiversity in our world. Put simply, we will not be able to solve for climate change without fixing the crisis of global water.  

Each of these dimensions of the trifecta of ecological shifts – climate change, a global water cycle that's out of kilter, and the loss of biodiversity - each of these dimensions is reinforcing the other and create a vicious cycle. The loss of water in the soil, and the degradation of the wetlands, reducing nature’s ability to store carbon, hence accentuating global warming, which in turn dries the soil - and the vicious cycle continues. That’s just one feature of this vicious cycle.

But we have to avoid being overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge. And we must avoid, too, over complexifying what needs to be done.

In fact, the beauty of this interdependence between the water crisis, climate change, and the biodiversity crisis, is that it is this very interdependence that allows us innovations in each dimension to have positive impacts on the other. Each innovation we make—in water, carbon, or in the forests - has ripple effects on all the other dimensions of this ecological trifecta. So the interdependence is both a threat to the planet, and a powerful benefit when it comes to solutions.

Take the agri-food industry, which has to be reformed for the sake of water, for the sake of climate, and for the sake of halting deforestation and the degradation of biodiversity.

Just consider the innovations needed in rice cultivation, for instance. It’s an important example because it's a major food staple, and a major source of livelihoods as well, but we know we cannot sustain traditional cultivation methods. The innovations that we know we can make in the next 10 to 20 years to move away from the flooding of rice fields or padi fields towards new methods: alternate wetting and drying, direct seeding of rice, and other forms of more efficient irrigation - these innovations don't just produce benefits for water use. Yes, they do reduce significantly the amount of water required to grow rice. But they also have major implications for methane emissions—in fact, a 50 percent reduction in methane emissions - and a 60 percent reduction in energy used in places where farmers pump water from under the ground.

So that one set of innovations to improve how we cultivate rice helps us with water and climate change at the same time. And it improves farmers' lives, when we introduce new seeds that are more weather-resilient and produce higher yields

Take another example: the culinary innovations that we are going to have to make, and must make, in the next few decades. I just checked the QR code at the table - fortunately, there's no beef on the diet tonight.

We can make that shift in our diets without reducing our quality of life in the least—a gradual, progressive shift towards plant-based proteins and away from our heavy dependence on animal-based proteins, particularly, beef. Again, that one shift me and less methane emissions, far less water consumption, and less loss of biodiversity that comes from deforestation.

And take AI - the major inflection of our times. AI, and the data centres and semiconductors behind it, consumes an inordinate amount of energy and water - the water needed for cooling systems. So we need major innovation to sustain AI’s growth and reap its full benefits in healthcare, in productivity in many other sectors without major cost to the environment.

The innovations are needed in semiconductor production and in every element of the data centre stack to make them less energy-intensive and less water-intensive. Again, we get multiple benefits.

Just two sets of innovations that are possible, that are in fact underway, that need to be scaled up, that take address both water and global warming at the same time.

A final point. Water is also a low-hanging fruit, politically speaking, in our efforts to address this trifecta: of climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and a global water cycle that's out of kilter. That’s because the benefits we will see from innovations and shifts in the way we use water are visible to people and communities, and they can be seen much earlier.  Farmers know it when they have better and more sustainable livelihoods. We know it when we no longer have a thousand kids under age five dying each year from drinking unclean water. We know it everywhere when we start using water more wisely, we start valuing it, because communities will benefit.

The local and visible nature of the benefits to reforming how we use water make this the low-hanging fruit in our efforts to address that broader trifecta of environmental change.

Water, too, can be a lever to rebuild multilateralism at a time when it is more needed than ever. It allows for cooperation with very few downsides: benefits for all nations and communities without anyone losing out.

So we must use water can be a lever for global cooperation. And work on it through our partnerships, with the urgency that's needed, with the innovativeness that's needed, and with the knowledge that we're at the same time contributing to tackling the much larger challenges of the planet if we succeed on water.

I speak as a co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, together with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Johan Rockström, Mariana Mazzucato. Our report is just the start of a process. The WEF, the Water Resources Group, the World Bank Group and several other organisations are taking forward its recommendations. Let's not be daunted by the challenge. Let's not over-complexify what needs to be done. Let's get going.