Water insecurity is on the map of forthcoming national security risks, together with food shortages.
Rather than addressing the root causes of water insecurity, many of which are political, several neoliberal governments and institutions are pushing to financialise the purification of water, using a similar framing and talking points to those used with carbon and biodiversity.
The provision of clean water might even be more appealing to institutional investors than biodiversity, as it is perceived by some as having the potential to provide high revenue streams.
As the roadmap towards nature credits has been added under the flagship actions of the Water Resilience Strategy, we fear that water quality trading might be part of nature credits in the future, and be instrumentalised politically to distract from the need to regulated overextraction, shift existing harmful subsidies and curb water pollution at source.