More than 400 people gathered at the Fokker Terminal in The Hague for Waterproof 2026. The event is the international meeting place where the Dutch water sector comes together to help shape tomorrow’s water solutions. It also marked the run-up to the UN Water Conference later this year in the United Arab Emirates.

For this special live edition of the Waterproof podcast, produced by Partners for Water, host Tracy Metz recorded in the middle of the event floor. Before introducing her guests, she asked attendees what had brought them there. The answers pointed to one shared concern: are we moving fast enough? “We can move so much faster, and we can only do that through collaboration, through scaling,” said one visitor from the Netherlands Water Partnership. Another, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, put it simply: “We really need each other.”

That sense of urgency ran through conversations with three guests: Neha Mungekar of the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Philip Minderhoud of Wageningen University & Research and Deltares, and Stephen Teeuwen of the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment.

Whose expertise counts?

Neha Mungekar, an architect and urbanist who trained in India before completing her Master’s and PhD in the Netherlands, spoke at Waterproof 2026 about ‘enabling environments’. Her starting point is what she calls the disabling side: water solutions are too often imagined as dikes, dams and pipes – technical fixes designed by engineers, for engineers.

But the people living with a water problem every day are rarely seen as experts. “Ask the homemaker, ask the mother,” Mungekar says. “She will say: when I open the tap, the pressure is not high enough. This is input that we need, but it’s not considered scientific enough.” That lived experience, she argues, is just as important as the technical work of building a pipe or a system. Both to understand the real problem and to check whether a solution is actually working.

Can a delta drown?

That was the title of the talk by Philip Minderhoud, associate professor specialising in land subsidence and relative sea level rise. “Spoiler alert,” he tells Metz, “the answer is yes.”

Subsidence – the gradual sinking of land – is a natural part of how deltas form. But groundwater extraction for agriculture, industry and growing populations is accelerating that process, sometimes by 15 to 20 centimetres a year. Combined with rising sea levels, this produces what Minderhoud calls relative sea level rise: in many deltas, the land is sinking faster than the sea is rising.

The effects can be dramatic and largely invisible. Minderhoud described images from the Philippines where rice fields, once productive, were submerged within a few years – an area more than 20 kilometres from the original coastline, now home to over 300,000 people living inside the tidal zone. “None of the people living in this area were aware that they were sinking,” he says. They blamed sea level rise, flooding or land reclamation, anything but the ground beneath their feet.

“It’s impossible to put a dike around an entire delta system, especially when you have sinking rates that go so fast you don’t have the time to simply adjust to it,” says Minderhoud. The Netherlands had a thousand years to adapt to life below sea level. Many other deltas do not have that time. The good news, he notes, is that subsidence driven by groundwater extraction can be tackled at the source, unlike global climate change, which no single delta can influence on its own. Tokyo and Shanghai successfully slowed their sinking by developing surface water alternatives.

Building trust across borders

Stephen Teeuwen of the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment works in West Africa, supporting governments with sustainable policy development. His organisation does not carry out environmental assessments itself, but helps ensure that the process is done well – including making sure all voices are heard.

In Benin, this meant organising a ‘Tour du Lac’: visits to all eight communities around a lake facing overfishing, pollution and invasive species, to hear directly what local people saw as the most pressing problems and opportunities. The result was a more complete picture: communities needed not only enough fish, but also the infrastructure to store and distribute their catch.

Asked about the most pressing water issue today, Teeuwen points to coordinated groundwater use: “I see a lot of different ministries that have a lot of different plans. These plans are all very important. But if everything is done at the same time without coordination, it’s going to lead to problems.” On a more hopeful note, he highlights a programme in Niger where five sector ministries now sit down together every two to three weeks to coordinate the management of the Niger River. It’s a sign that collaboration, not just technology, is where the real progress will come from.

Cautiously optimistic

Reflecting on the conversations at Waterproof 2026, Metz describes herself as cautiously optimistic. “I am not naive. I know this is an uphill battle,” she says, “but I take strength from the brilliant people I’ve met and spoken with today. They shared their fears and their challenges, but they also shared their ideas and their actual, workable, actionable solutions.” Whether it is rethinking who counts as an expert, tackling subsidence at its source, or building trust between institutions, the message from Waterproof Live is consistent: implementation depends as much on people and collaboration as it does on technology.

What does it take, in your experience, to move a good water idea from the drawing board to lasting implementation?

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Thomas Edison’s words could be the motto for this edition of the Waterproof podcast, where guests share what happened when water projects didn’t go quite as planned – and what the sector learned from it.

This article is based on the ‘Failing Forward’ episode of Waterproof, a podcast by Partners for Water.

A quiz show about menstruation might seem like an unusual way to start a conversation about water and sanitation failures. But that is exactly what Esther Shaylor, Innovation Manager at UNICEF and part of the WASH Failure Movement, did – using humour to break down the barriers that keep professionals from openly discussing what goes wrong.

In the Waterproof podcast episode ‘Failing Forward’ Tracy Metz speaks with four guests who have all, in their own way, learned that progress in the water sector often comes through trial, error and honest reflection.

Talking about failure openly

Esther is the driving force behind the WASH Failure Movement. She has spent years encouraging colleagues to speak openly about projects that did not go as planned. “We really want to talk about failure,” she says. “We want to openly and freely share it so that we can learn from it.”

That openness has surfaced some striking stories. In Afghanistan, pipes were laid to bring water directly to women’s doorsteps – seemingly a clear improvement. But for many women, the daily walk to collect water was also their only opportunity to leave the house and meet others. The result: some damaged the pipes themselves so that water collection, and the social contact that came with it, could continue.

Then there is the story of the jerrycan. UNICEF set out to design and manufacture an improved jerrycan for emergency settings, investing heavily in research and a custom mould. When it was finally tested with users, however, most still preferred the original product. “This is something I have learned repeatedly,” Shaylor reflects. “We need to define what success looks like before we start.”

When good intentions meet a different context

For Zahid Amin Shashoto of Uttaran, a grassroots organisation in southwest coastal Bangladesh, failure is often less about technology and more about context. In the 1960s, Dutch-style polders were introduced to support intensive farming. But unlike in the Netherlands, water that entered these polders could not easily get out, leaving the land waterlogged for months at a time.

“My community is primarily farmers,” Shashoto explains. “And if farmers don’t have farmland – if it’s underwater – they go out.” Many farmers leased their flooded land to large-scale shrimp farmers, introducing saltwater onto land that had supported rice cultivation for generations.

“Serious mistakes were made in thinking that Bangladesh looks very much like the Netherlands, which it doesn’t,” Shashoto says. “The technology itself isn’t bad. But introducing the technology without considering the context is a mistake.” A related lesson came from a project that provided arsenic and salt filtration systems for drinking water: highly effective, but too costly for communities reliant on government subsidies to maintain once the project ended.

Uttaran’s response has been to shift towards what Shashoto calls a “negotiated approach”: channelling funding directly to communities so they can address water, education and land issues together, as a collective.

A safe space to fail

At the Green Village, a field lab at TU Delft, failure is built into the design. “For us, it’s interesting to look at things that are new, that are not yet applied or not yet validated,” explains Lindsey Schwidder, programme manager for climate adaptation. “And here, they are also allowed to fail.”

One entrepreneur tested a pavement substructure made from recycled glass waste, designed to store rainwater underground. The product worked, but because it was officially classified as ‘waste’, every delivery required a separate environmental permit. The barrier was not the technology, but the paperwork. Eventually, the material was reclassified as a building material, resolving the issue.

Other experiments reveal similar friction. Lighter-coloured pavements could reduce summer temperatures by several degrees, but municipal style guides often prescribe specific colours, making adoption difficult. And for green parking spaces designed to let rainwater filter into the ground, it is not always clear which municipal department is responsible for maintenance. As Schwidder puts it, making climate adaptation work requires bringing legal experts, financial teams, contractors and maintenance departments to the table, not just engineers.

Failure as part of diplomacy

Even at the highest levels of international water diplomacy, things do not always go to plan. Former Water Envoy Henk Ovink, who now leads the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, recalls preparations for the 2023 UN Water Conference with Tajikistan. Early on, communication stalled: “There was a shopping list from the Netherlands on what needed to change. And on Tajikistan’s side, there was the question: why do we need to change course?”

By investing time in understanding each other’s perspectives, the relationship recovered and strengthened. “We made the mistake of being too preoccupied with our own ideas,” Ovink reflects. “But we learned fast, and it really paid off.”

For Ovink, this is the essence of failing forward: “A lot of things go wrong before things really go right. Learning is exactly what failure is all about.”

As Edison put it, failure is just another way of finding out what does not work. Across the water sector – from UNICEF’s jerrycans to Bangladesh’s polders, from Delft’s experimental pavements to UN water diplomacy – the willingness to examine what went wrong, and why, is what turns setbacks into progress.

Did you know that billions of people still wash their clothes by hand? That whole cities are being designed to float? And that a machine in Amsterdam makes water out of thin air? These are the people making it happen.

Water problems can feel abstract – until a dam breaks, a tap runs dry, or women spend three hours of their day doing laundry by hand. The people working on water solutions know this better than anyone. They are engineers, diplomats, hydrologists and development bankers, and what unites them is a refusal to accept the status quo.

This article is based on the ‘Wet Breakthroughs!’ episode of Waterproof, a podcast by Partners for Water.

Building where others wouldn’t dare

Rutger de Graaf has spent two decades designing buildings that float. As co-founder of Blue21, he sees floating cities not as a distant vision but as a practical obligation; a response to rising seas and rapid urbanisation in delta regions where hundreds of millions already live. He is now working on a floating social housing complex made up of 45 apartments in Zwolle, bringing the technology to lower-income groups. The obstacles, he argues, are rarely technical. “The biggest crisis is our lack of imagination.”

But imagination alone does not build cities. The systems around an innovation need to be just as ready as the innovation itself.

The unglamorous work that makes everything else possible

Mary Matthews, Global Water Lead ad interim at UNDP, works in that space. Her focus is governance: getting ministries, regulators and investors aligned. Without it, even the most promising solutions stall. One example she highlights is the Women in Water Diplomacy Network – a programme that trains women mediators to resolve water disputes at community and transboundary level. It builds on the insight that inclusive dialogue produces more durable solutions. “When governance works, the money follows.”

Governance creates the conditions. What happens next depends on the quality of the decisions made within them, and that requires seeing the full picture.

Seeing the whole city at once

Seeing the full picture is exactly what Florian Witsenburg’s company Tygron makes possible. Their digital twins – virtual models of cities and landscapes – let planners and emergency responders test scenarios before they unfold in reality. In Nijmegen, one such model revealed the cumulative impact of 90 simultaneous housing developments, breaking a city-wide building freeze. When the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine was destroyed in 2023, Tigron modelled the resulting flood within half an hour, guiding aid organisations into an active war zone.

Digital twins can map a crisis in real time. However, in some parts of the world, the most urgent problem does not show up on any map. There simply is no water.

Making water from nothing

In places where there is no water, Amsterdam-based Solaq pulls water directly from the air using a wet desiccant process. Co-founder Reuben Moore explains that each unit produces 2,000 litres per day, fits in a shipping container and runs on solar energy or waste heat. The first pilots are running in Mexico, Spain and Brazil, including communities where over 1.5 million people depend on water trucks for water that is not even safe to drink. “We are first focusing on creating a source of water security for places where there simply is no other alternative.”

Having water is one thing. The daily reality it enables – or doesn’t enable – is quite another.

The overlooked burden

For Tanja Huizer, Senior Water Resilience Specialist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), that daily reality is laundry. Huizer has spent years drawing attention to this seemingly simple household task. She shares that between four and five billion people still wash clothes by hand. Women spend roughly 20% of their active time – around three hours daily – on this work alone. The ADB’s Laundry Movement addresses this. It tackles environmental pollution, builds public-private partnerships and focuses on social innovation. The goal is better conditions, with dignity intact. “We have had washing machines for over a hundred years. So let’s allow everybody to benefit from them now.”

The scale of water challenges can feel paralysing. But as these five innovators show, the responses come in every shape and size – from city-wide floating infrastructure to a machine in a shipping container to the simple act of doing laundry with dignity. What they share is the conviction that no one needs to solve everything. Each piece matters. Together, they add up to a waterproof future.

In the heart of Mexico City, a water management system built by the Aztecs is still functioning today. It cools the city, cleans water, and grows food. In the recent episode of the Waterproof podcast ‘The Indigenous Voice’, four indigenous scientists and educators explain why solutions like this are not relics of the past, but blueprints for the future.

Ancient infrastructure that is still running

In the centre of Mexico City, food is being grown on raised agricultural fields surrounded by shallow canals. The irrigation water is on site. The system cools ambient air temperature by four to five degrees. It provides flood protection, supports biodiversity, and has been doing all of this continuously for around a thousand years. The Chinampas, first developed by the Nahua people and expanded by the Aztecs, were already in place when Europeans arrived, and remain in use today.

For the Waterproof podcast episode ‘The Indigenous Voice’, host Tracy Metz travelled to Stockholm Water Week 2025 last August to speak with four indigenous water experts. Their message is not that modern science should step aside. It is that it should pay closer attention.

Nature as infrastructure

Julia Watson is a landscape architect and the author of Lo-TEK, a field guide documenting indigenous water technologies from around the world. She is the only non-indigenous voice on the episode but has spent her career documenting indigenous technologies in meticulous technical detail.

Watson’s documentations include the living root bridges of the Khasi community in northeastern India – grown, not built, from Ficus trees over decades, in a region with some of the highest rainfall on earth. Bridges that get stronger with age. She also points to Sponge City, the urban water planning model now being replicated across China and beyond, which mimics natural water cycles in precisely the way indigenous communities have managed them for centuries.

What Watson calls Lo-TEK – traditional ecological knowledge – is not a romantic alternative to modern engineering but a body of proven, replicable, often scalable technology.

Invited to the table, not to the conversation

Dr. KaiLei’a Duriano is 24 years old, a marine biologist and oceanographer from Oahu, and a fellow at The Nature Conservancy’s Hawaii chapter. At Stockholm Water Week, she addressed the international water community on indigenous rights and representation in academia. She describes her experience in formal academic settings as one of feeling patronised and tokenised – invited to diversify a table but not genuinely heard at it. Dr. Yolanda López Maldonado, a Maya earth system scientist and founder of Indigenous Science, puts the structural issue plainly: western science does not need to lend credibility to what traditional knowledge holders already know. The knowledge has existed for generations. What is needed is not validation but partnership.

When the law isn’t enough

Anna-Kari Kroik is a Sami educator based in Stockholm. In the episode, she gives her sobering account of the gap between legal recognition and real political power. Sweden has a legal requirement to consult the Sami people before any development on their traditional lands. In practice, she says, the mining companies and the energy sector tend to prevail. Lake Akkajaure has been dammed for hydropower; the water levels are managed for electricity generation, not for the land or the communities who have lived alongside it for generations. Sacred sites are now inaccessible. Old houses have fallen into the water.

Dr. Milika Sobey, a marine scientist and Senior Technical Adviser at GIZ who grew up as part of the indigenous majority in Fiji, offers perhaps the clearest framing of what a genuine partnership between knowledge systems would look like: not western science conferring legitimacy on traditional knowledge, but two bodies of expertise each contributing what the other cannot provide alone.

A question of humility

The one thing all four guests shared, regardless of where they were from, was a deep respect for nature and for water – a relationship that Tracy Metz observes humankind has largely lost in its pursuit of dominion and profit. That is precisely why Partners for Water works to ensure that technological interventions take customary water rights, cultural values, and traditional governance into account. There is, without question, growing attention to indigenous knowledge in water policy. But as Anna-Kari Kroik’s account of the Sami lands makes clear, increased visibility does not yet mean equal political weight. The chinampas of Mexico City are a reminder of what genuine partnership between knowledge systems can look like: infrastructure and ecology not in competition but woven together. The answers have been there all along. The harder part is being humble enough to look.

🎧 ‘The Indigenous Voice’ is an episode of Waterproof, the podcast from Partners for Water. It is hosted by Tracy Metz, the episode features Julia Watson, Dr. Yolanda López Maldonado, Anna-Kari Kroik, Dr. KaiLei’a Duriano, and Dr. Milika Sobey. Listen to the podcast here.

“I did it. I did it.” It is August 2025, at the edge of Stockholm. A group of World Water Week delegates has just run into a lake. Among them is Waterproof podcast host Tracy Metz. Laughing and slightly breathless, she emerges from the water, happy of having taken the cold plunge.

The swim marks the first UN World Lakes Day. It is a celebration, but also a reminder. As Metz notes, “lakes everywhere are heavily polluted.” The question is no longer whether water quality is under pressure, but how communities choose to respond. Across continents, a growing movement is doing just that. They are reclaiming rivers and lakes not only as infrastructure to manage, but as public spaces to swim in and, ultimately, to drink from.

In the Waterproof podcast episode ‘Drinkable Rivers, Swimmable Cities’, produced by Partners for Water, Metz speaks with organisers, writers and artists who are rethinking our relationship with water – from urban swimming initiatives to legal recognition of rivers as living entities.

Swimming as a standard

In the run-up to the Paris 2024 Olympics, the Seine was cleaned so that athletes could compete in it. What once seemed unrealistic suddenly became visible: a capital city investing heavily to make a river safe for swimming. The Swimmable Cities platform emerged in the run-up to these Olympics.

“Just before the Olympics, we launched the Swimmable Cities Charter,” explains co-founder Matt Sykes. “It promotes communities’ right to swim, but also the rights of nature.”

Today, more than 150 organisations across 80 cities have signed the charter. For Sykes, swimming is more than just a hobby or sport, it is also a political signal. If people can safely enter the water, then wastewater systems, monitoring and governance must be functioning.

At a time of polarised climate debates, he argues that water offers common ground. “This practice of swimming and connection to waterways is able to cross political divides. We see this in different cities around the world,” he says. “As our traditional knowledge carers teach us, water connects us all. It’s our lifeblood.”

From swimmable to drinkable

For Li An Phoa, founder of Drinkable Rivers, the ambition goes further. She walked the entire 370 kilometres of the Scheldt, joined by 1,300 people and hundreds of children conducting citizen science. The aim was not symbolic protest but collective ownership.

During the walk, local leaders drafted a River Intent declaration stating that all those who live, work and use the Scheldt river basin express a shared dream of a drinkable Scheldt. Two municipalities have since signed. It signals the start of a concrete shift from aspiration to policy.

Phoa’s philosophy is direct and pragmatic: “Don’t wait for a mandate. Your care, your love for your place can have a tremendous impact.”

Why swimmable and drinkable matter

Part of the strength of these movements lies in the clarity of their ambition. “Swimmable” and “drinkable” are not abstract policy terms. They are standards that anyone can understand. Either you can safely enter the water, or you cannot. Either you can drink it, or you cannot.

By framing water management in these terms, complex discussions about treatment plants, discharge permits and monitoring data become tangible. A swimmable river signals that systems are functioning. A drinkable river signals a higher level of trust – in regulation, enforcement and long-term commitment.

Rethinking the status of rivers

Another strand of this movement comes from writer Robert MacFarlane. He does not call himself an activist, but a campaigner and a writer. In his book Is a River Alive?, MacFarlane explores how we think about rivers in law, language and culture.

“We are quite content that corporations have rights,” he observes. “But a river who’s flowed for 10,000 years? No, absolutely not.”

In England and Wales, he notes, “not a single river is in good overall health, 0% in good chemical health.” The ecological crisis is evident, yet so is resistance. “Hope is a discipline,” Macfarlane says. “It arises from the hard, organised work of change making.”

That disciplined work takes many forms. In The Hague, the Embassy of the North Sea explores what it would mean to recognise a sea as a political actor. Its goal, says sound artist Harpo ’t Hart, is that “the North Sea would eventually become its own political person. With its own interests and its own rights.”

Beyond infrastructure

What connects these initiatives is a shared shift in perspective. Rivers and seas are no longer treated solely as channels to manage or resources to optimise. They are public spaces to enter, ecosystems to restore, and – increasingly – entities whose interests must be represented.

Clean water is the result of public engagement, political consistency and legal imagination. As Metz reflects, the people driving this work “are not politicians or officials. They’re people like you and me who feel that they need to do something.”

In a world facing intensifying water challenges, the ambition for swimmable cities and drinkable rivers reflects a broader question: how do we choose to live with water – and who speaks on its behalf?

💬 What do you think: should swimmable or drinkable standards become clearer benchmarks in urban water policy?

🎧 This article is based on the Waterproof podcast episode ‘Drinkable Rivers, Swimmable Cities’, produced by Partners for Water. Listen to the podcast here.

“You were right – it’s raining.” A farmer in Ghana sends this message after receiving a WhatsApp weather alert.

This simple exchange represents something much larger. It’s the final link in a chain connecting satellites, AI, and communities that increasingly need timely information to adapt to a changing climate.

The scale of the challenge

2024 was the hottest year on record in at least 175 years, resulting in 125 million people displaced by water-related disasters and economic losses exceeding $200 billion annually. As floods and droughts intensify, early warning systems are becoming more and more essential.

For the Waterproof podcast episode Early Warnings!, host Tracy Metz spoke with innovators working on these challenges daily – from social media monitoring in the Philippines to satellite forecasting in southern Africa. What connects them is not only their focus on early warning systems, but also support from Partners for Water.

Technology meets reality

In the podcast episode, Jurjen Wagemaker of FloodTags describes a moment that illustrates the value of early warning systems. His team had just delivered their monitoring system to an operation centre in the Philippines. Wagemaker shares: “We were in the room next to the operations centre, and all of a sudden there was a big activity next door. Everybody was pointing to the new system. I went into the operation room and I asked, what’s happening?” Apparently, FloodTags had detected flooding that the local authorities hadn’t yet registered. Within minutes, the operation centre was able to verify the information and begin coordinating their response.

FloodTags collects data from social media platforms worldwide, processing around 5 million observations monthly and identifying about ten significant floods daily. Why social media? Because floods begin on the ground, and that’s often where reality surfaces first.

For instance, in Semarang, Indonesia, social media revealed why a critical pump wasn’t working during a flood: the key to the pump house was missing. These operational realities provide not only real-time information for immediate response, but also insights that can improve future processes.

When data creates trust

Sindy Mthimkhulu, Executive Secretary of INMACOM, manages shared water resources between South Africa, Eswatini, and Mozambique – 45,000 square kilometres serving 3.5 million people. “When water is released upstream and someone downstream isn’t aware, they can be caught off guard,” she explained. “Early warning allows us to alert people before they’re at risk.”

The solution they use is called GLOW – the Global Water Availability and Demand Forecasting Service. Developed by Dutch companies Hydrologic and FutureWater with Partners for Water support, GLOW uses satellite data to predict water conditions up to three months ahead.

GLOW does not only provide forecasting. It also supports building trust. Thanks to this innovative system, all three countries access the same real-time data through a shared platform. When water levels change, everyone sees it simultaneously. “We’re not fighting over water anymore,” Sindy noted. “When Mozambique sees less water arriving, they can also see it’s not being held upstream – it’s simply not available. That transparency builds trust.”

From data to local action

Advanced forecasting technology is valuable, but it only becomes useful when it reaches the people who need it in a form they can act upon. That might mean a WhatsApp message telling a farmer in Ghana about approaching rain, a text alert advising urban residents to move to higher ground, or an announcement broadcast at a local market.

Dorien Lugt of HKV works on urban flooding early warning systems in countries like Ethiopia and Ghana. She describes the work as “a process, not a project – step-by-step development of better early warning capacity.”

That process involves three interconnected stages. First, establishing the data infrastructure for accurate forecasting. Second, operationalising those forecasts within government systems. Third, ensuring the warnings reach communities through appropriate channels. In some places that’s WhatsApp, in others it’s loudspeakers at markets or announcements through religious institutions. What matters is that it’s effectively tailored to how people actually receive and trust information.

The opportunity to respond

It’s worth acknowledging that early warning systems exist because we’re responding to climate change, not yet solving it. These technologies address the symptoms of a warming planet rather than the underlying causes. But as extreme weather events continue to increase in frequency and severity, they represent a crucial part of our adaptation strategy.

Whether it’s a farmer checking WhatsApp, someone verifying river levels, or communities preparing for floods, the need is the same: information enabling timely action. Early warning provides the opportunity to respond before crisis strikes. In a changing climate, that opportunity makes all the difference.

🎧 This article is based on the Waterproof podcast episode Early Warning!, produced by Partners for Water. Listen to the full episode for the complete stories about impactful early warning systems.

Water security is not an isolated issue but a global challenge that demands collaboration and innovation. For World Water Day, programme coordinator Liliane Geerling explains how the Partners for Water podcast ‘Waterproof’ maps approaches to navigating complex water challenges. From avocado plantations in distant deltas to the decision-making rooms of international financial institutions – water security is based on interconnectivity, where every link in the chain plays a crucial role.

The Waterproof podcast is more than a platform for uplifting water stories: it’s a strategic instrument to stimulate systems-thinking solutions. It covers six themes, from Nature-based Solutions to Greening Finance. Waterproof challenges listeners to stop seeing water as an isolated challenge, but rather as a complex ecosystem that requires integral, collaborative approaches. “All six topics are directly related to the theme of water security. But not only that, they are also interconnected. By approaching and working with them in this way, you aim for systems change,” Geerling explains.