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Tuesday’s White House Water Summit was the venue for announcing corporate promises to help support water research and development, hastened in part by the drought in the Western states as well as the Flint, Michigan lead-poisoned water scandal.
San Francisco-based Ultra Capital will invest $1.5 billion in decentralized “water management solutions” and GE, headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, has pledge $500 million over the next decade on water and reuse technologies. Ali Zaidi, associate director for natural resources at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget called the corporate funds, “an investment opportunity that has the potential for great returns.”
Another $35 million in federal grants to support cutting edge water science was announced by the White House. This includes $4 million in grants from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Public Policy Institute of California.
The four-hour conference was attended by more than 200 water experts, scientists, policy makers and high tech innovators. White House administration officials used the summit to promote their 20-page drought resilience action plan.
Including calls for better data collection and improved coordination among government agencies, the plan also suggests specific projects, including a new prize for water innovations and initiating a study of “the broad implications of a prolonged drought in California.”
Capitalizing on solutions to California’s drought and water crisis, the summit featured projects from half a world away. The Israel-California Green-Tech Partnership, founded by Bay Area entrepreneurs Mark Doing, Ashleigh Talberth and Aaron Tartakovsky, has teamed with Los Angeles’ Cleantech Incubator to bring 10 of Israel’s start-ups to California in an attempt to find new resolutions to California’s drought. The partnership anticipates being functioning by this summer.
“Israel has been a world leader in the water sector for a long time,” said Tartakovsky. “Israel actually is water independent which means if it doesn’t rain Israel is going to be OK. And that’s the type of approach we want to have in California.”
While discussions at the summit were more focused on 21-st century tech-related investments as opposed to California farmers’ frustrations that their water supplies are limited by inflexible bureaucrats and regulations that protect endangered species protections.
Joya Banerjee, a senior program officer with the San Francisco-based S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation noted that “In California, as we’re struggling with drought and water scarcity, data has enabled us to find solutions.”
Banerjee announced at the summit an effort to “modernize our data systems” via Project Water Data. Similarly, the White House presented a new, improved “national water model” for forecasting river flows.
