Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Game Changers. I'm Matt Goldman. As
Speaker 1: the Earth is facing an increasingly consequential climate crisis, inquisitive
Speaker 1: minds all over the globe are hard at work trying
Speaker 1: to find solutions, and many of them have been able
Speaker 1: to translate their Eureka moments into action at a greater
Speaker 1: pace than scope than sometimes gloomy headlines might have us think.
Speaker 1: In this four part mini series, will meet the visionary
Speaker 1: minds who attempt to sculpt the future of sustainable energy
Speaker 1: and global resources. Will get a peek behind the curtains
Speaker 1: of their factory floors here of the sometimes surprising origins
Speaker 1: of their ideas, and be introduced to a potentially greener tomorrow.
Speaker 1: In this episode, water Harvesting. The Mexico City metropolitan area,
Speaker 1: home to twenty two million people, is densely populated and
Speaker 1: heavily traffic A visitor walking on its bustling streets might
Speaker 1: be surprised to learn what lies underneath it. We are
Speaker 1: not in a vali, We're actually in a basin. That's
Speaker 1: Dr Manuel parallel Cohen, a full time researcher at the
Speaker 1: Institute of Social Investigations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Speaker 1: We are on the top of lakes, but we don't
Speaker 1: see those lakes. This is also a basin where many
Speaker 1: rivers flow into the lower parts of the city, and
Speaker 1: you could see those rivers. Nowadays you see only highways
Speaker 1: with the name of those rivers. Founded in the fourteenth century,
Speaker 1: then known as Tenochtitland, Mexico City was initially built on
Speaker 1: a tiny island in the Valley of Mexico. Over the
Speaker 1: course of the last four hundred years, the city focused
Speaker 1: on draining the water as it was expanding its borders,
Speaker 1: and it's been efficient. Where once there was a lake
Speaker 1: now stands one of the vastest cities in the world.
Speaker 1: But this doesn't mean the city is all dry. Mexico
Speaker 1: City gets more rain yearly than the notoriously wet London,
Speaker 1: and beneath its streets you'll find enormous aquifers. We have
Speaker 1: around eighteen hundred deep whales that provide that water, and
Speaker 1: we import also water from distant basis. So you have
Speaker 1: to realize that we have the largest water infrastructure, perhaps
Speaker 1: in the world, both to prevent the city from floods,
Speaker 1: but at the same time to provide water to those
Speaker 1: twenty two point five million inhabitants. Knowing this, it might
Speaker 1: seem paradoxical that Mexico City in many ways is lacking water.
Speaker 1: Those aquifers have been over exploited over the years. We
Speaker 1: which means that we take more water than the one
Speaker 1: that percolates into those aquifers. They are not imbalanced. We
Speaker 1: draw too much water from them. A crumbling infrastructure isn't
Speaker 1: making things easier about. The water produced by the system
Speaker 1: is lost through leaks. All this combined has led to
Speaker 1: a crisis in this naturally water abundant area. Mexico City
Speaker 1: is one of the top ten cities in the world
Speaker 1: at risk of running out of water. There are at
Speaker 1: least one million people in Mexico City who live in
Speaker 1: areas that are that are not suited for infrastructure, so
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to bring the water through the bipelines.
Speaker 1: It's it's almost impossible. That's only in Mexico City. I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about Mexico Cities metropolitan area. And those people
Speaker 1: who are most hurt are the people who live in
Speaker 1: the worst conditions, the poor people, because they live in
Speaker 1: the worst located places. On the one hand, but on
Speaker 1: the other hand, poor people really don't have places where
Speaker 1: to store water. You know, living without water is something
Speaker 1: that if you've never actually experienced, it's hard to imagine
Speaker 1: not and it dominates your life. This is in Reque.
Speaker 1: Lomnitz one of the co founders and general director of
Speaker 1: Isla Urbana, a project dedicated to developing water sustainability in
Speaker 1: Mexico City. So, especially low income parts of Mexico City,
Speaker 1: peripheral parts of Mexico City and the people that live
Speaker 1: around it are now facing a situation where they open
Speaker 1: the top and no water comes out or brown water
Speaker 1: comes out for a few seconds. So if you live
Speaker 1: in a house that doesn't get water or gets water
Speaker 1: just once every you know, one or two weeks, water
Speaker 1: starts becoming this really central dynamic that takes over almost
Speaker 1: all of the house now, So everybody is very very
Speaker 1: attentive to when there's water. So if there's water in
Speaker 1: the good for a moment, everybody runs out and tries
Speaker 1: to fill up all of the buckets and containers that
Speaker 1: they possibly can so that they can kind of hold
Speaker 1: over for however long they need to until they get
Speaker 1: water again, which they never know when there's gonna be
Speaker 1: water again. You know, about ten years ago in Regue
Speaker 1: and one of its co founders, both industrial designers, were
Speaker 1: discussing ways to support sustainability issues in the low income
Speaker 1: parts of Mexico City, with no clear ideas in mind.
Speaker 1: They started interviewing people about their everyday lives and water
Speaker 1: started coming up over and over and over again. People
Speaker 1: just started telling us about out water, and they start
Speaker 1: telling us about how their water situation was getting worse
Speaker 1: and worse. They started telling us how they, you know,
Speaker 1: they used to get water out of the grid maybe
Speaker 1: two three times a week. Now they're getting water one
Speaker 1: day every two weeks. How they never used to buy
Speaker 1: water trucks, now they're buying several water trucks a year.
Speaker 1: The water trucks are an attempt to put a band
Speaker 1: aid on the wound. The government subsidizes water trucks for
Speaker 1: low income places. So maybe you have to go to
Speaker 1: like a government agency order a water truck, and but
Speaker 1: they'll tell you, you know, you'll get your water truck
Speaker 1: in two to four weeks, for example, and no idea
Speaker 1: when so a lot of houses actually have to have
Speaker 1: somebody at home all the time in case the water
Speaker 1: truck shows up. So that they can receive it not
Speaker 1: because if not they don't, they lose. They lose the
Speaker 1: water truck and their place in the line. Enrique and
Speaker 1: his colleagues zeroed in on an idea. Instead of getting
Speaker 1: water by truck or from below, how about looking to
Speaker 1: the sky. There's nothing new about rainwater harvesting, and people
Speaker 1: have been harvesting rainwater since they first kind of like
Speaker 1: open their mouths and looked up at the sky. At
Speaker 1: the same time, notice that there's rainwater harvesting systems that
Speaker 1: are six thousand years old throughout the world. But um,
Speaker 1: but I don't think anyone had really taken the challenge
Speaker 1: of how do we get a modern, massive metropolis to
Speaker 1: start harvesting rainwater on a massive scale. The team built
Speaker 1: their first rainwater harvesting system, a simple and cheap arrangement
Speaker 1: made up of a big plastic water tank installed on
Speaker 1: the ground level, gutters, some pipes, and a filter hooked
Speaker 1: up on the roof. One of the women they had
Speaker 1: interviewed agreed to try it out. And this woman, who
Speaker 1: I think is very scientifically minded, Uh, shut off the
Speaker 1: city grid, the water, the city water connection. She said,
Speaker 1: let's see how we do just with rainwater. Not even
Speaker 1: the East lat Urbana team expected the outcome. And they
Speaker 1: went eight months, eight continuous months before they had to
Speaker 1: open up the city grid again. So they did eight
Speaker 1: continuous months of full autonomy just on rainwater. And that
Speaker 1: was like a that blew up in my mind and
Speaker 1: and and this my co founder Renata, who I was
Speaker 1: working with it it kind of blew our minds. We're like, okay,
Speaker 1: this is this is really good, Like this really works
Speaker 1: beyond what we kind of had imagined. The team rented
Speaker 1: a room across the street from the first installment and
Speaker 1: proceeded to organize community meetings. A bunch of the neighbors
Speaker 1: started like joining in kind of none. We started installing
Speaker 1: rainwater harvesting systems with our neighbors little by little, and
Speaker 1: you know, it was a very want at a time,
Speaker 1: very retail kind of community activism kind of work, talking
Speaker 1: to communities about rainwater harvesting and and people you know,
Speaker 1: like agreeing to experiments. So we start experimenting with different
Speaker 1: rainwater harvesting systems, and um we started putting up more
Speaker 1: and more and more of these systems in the area.
Speaker 1: As the word spread, the local government got in touch
Speaker 1: and they came back and they said, um, could you
Speaker 1: please write us a quote for five rainwater harvesting systems.
Speaker 1: And this was the first time anybody had asked us
Speaker 1: for like a quote, and so we like, we're very excited,
Speaker 1: and we wrote a very um a very like low budget.
Speaker 1: You know, we just wanted them to to to accept
Speaker 1: the quote now. So we wrote this quote for five systems,
Speaker 1: and they came back and they said, okay, we want
Speaker 1: five hundreds of these systems. And so we were like terrified,
Speaker 1: no and very excited, but also like, okay, how do
Speaker 1: we do this? And that was this huge quantum kind
Speaker 1: of step for us, and we installed. We ended up
Speaker 1: installing close to a thousand rainwater harvesting systems, working directly
Speaker 1: with this local administration. By now, a decade after installing
Speaker 1: the first unit, East La Urbana are working directly with
Speaker 1: the government of Mexico City, installing almost sixties systems a
Speaker 1: day throughout the metropolitan area, over twenty thousand or out there,
Speaker 1: harvesting a total of eight hundred and seven million liters
Speaker 1: of water annually. For the recipients of these units, this
Speaker 1: can be truly life changing. So if you have a
Speaker 1: house that has say a hundred square meter roof stay,
Speaker 1: which would be what um nine square feet or something
Speaker 1: like that. It's not it's not a huge house at all.
Speaker 1: It's the house like that can get up to around
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand liters of water per year, which is
Speaker 1: about twelve water trucks. The problem at that point becomes
Speaker 1: they just don't have enough tanks to store it all.
Speaker 1: Like actually, they'll use as much water as they can store,
Speaker 1: and they'll go the whole rainy season and they'll usually
Speaker 1: go five, six, seven, eight months a year. They can
Speaker 1: be water autonomous. Now, it's that depending on the size
Speaker 1: of their roof. And then houses that have bigger tanks.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's houses that go all year, and that's
Speaker 1: really what we're after now. No, it's just doing more
Speaker 1: and more rainwater harvesting systems and getting entire parts of
Speaker 1: Mexico City to become places where every time it rains,
Speaker 1: just thousands and thousands of rainwater harvesting tanks just fill
Speaker 1: up with water. For his part, Dr Perlo sees new
Speaker 1: models being developed and it makes him optimistic about the future.
Speaker 1: We're not going to be able to return to the
Speaker 1: old lake, say stem or the old Teno Stitland, the
Speaker 1: Aztec city in the middle of the lake. That's gone.
Speaker 1: But we can have a new water model for the city,
Speaker 1: a model where we keep water, a model where we
Speaker 1: have enough water. We have springs, we have rivers, we
Speaker 1: have small lakes, we have hydraulic parks. We have really
Speaker 1: uh world of water. And that's possible. It's not utopia,
Speaker 1: it's not something that comes out of a dream. It
Speaker 1: can be a reality. This episode of Game Changers was
Speaker 1: produced by Magnus Hendrickson and presented by Yours Truly Matt Goldman.
Speaker 1: It was based on recording by Tom Gibson. For a
Speaker 1: visual experience of Games Drangers, check out our videos at
Speaker 1: bloomberg dot com slash Green. Francesca Levie is the head
Speaker 1: of Bloomberg Podcasts. See you next time.