GALA 2025Recap GALA 2026Water Is Life
Editorial portrait obscured by a lotus leaf above a bed of lotus leaves

Wednesday 23 September 2026

Roundtable I: Navigating Peak Water: Aligning Investors Around a New Normal

Moss, New York · Climate Week NYC

Liu Yi

Event Summary

The capital is there. The connective tissue is not.

During Climate Week NYC, THE NAT brought together a hand-picked roundtable of investors, lenders, corporate water leads, scientists, founders and field practitioners, in partnership with CGC, ENVEST and Salesforce.

The session scanned capital bottlenecks across the full water value chain — from source to treatment, distribution and reuse — to identify the solutions that could align capital behind water.

The Central Question

Can water compete for capital on its own returns, or is it structurally underpriced because we do not yet value the natural infrastructure doing this work for free?

Five Takeaways

  1. 01

    The value is systemic, but no one party pays for it.

    Watershed restoration and freshwater infrastructure benefit many users at once, so no single actor has enough reason to fund it alone.

  2. 02

    Death by pilot.

    Water technologies are piloted again and again but rarely bought. Regulation, procurement and cautious utilities keep proven solutions stuck before they scale.

  3. 03

    Every basin is different.

    Solutions have to be local, planned at basin scale, and joined up with existing infrastructure.

  4. 04

    Value water, but do not simply monetise it.

    Full-value accounting changes the investment case — with strong pushback on treating water as a commodity for profit.

  5. 05

    Scale needs portfolios, public–private structures and trust.

    Multi-asset portfolios, green banks, corporate coalitions, legal capacity and community trust can move water from specialist to mainstream.

Numbers from the Room

~$800bnnature finance gap — which philanthropy alone will not close
$5–30mtypical size of municipal water projects, against the $100m+ cheques infrastructure investors look for
30,000 galof water recycled a day by the blackwater system at Salesforce Tower, San Francisco
$18tnin assets represented by investors in Ceres’ Valuing Water Finance Initiative
30+green banks CGC has helped create across the US and internationally
30–40%of a US municipality’s energy budget can go on water

Figures as shared by participants during the session.

In partnership with: CGC, ENVEST, Salesforce · Scene setter: Circle of Blue

Back to Solutions Series

THE NAT SOLUTIONS SERIES NYC WAS SUPPORTED BY THE WALTON FAMILY FOUNDATION