Water

This 9th episode of Waterproof, my podcast for Partners for Water, is about early warning systems. There is a lot of technology available now that helps gather data about upcoming weather – floods, flash floods, drought, even flash droughts. Satellites are continually circling the earth, weather stations measure what’s happening on the ground, people post millions of weather events on social media and AI can crunch the numbers in the blink of an eye. That’s all great, but what about the last mile? How do you get the warning from the satellite to the farmer and the citydweller? Early warning is the new – digital – interface between climate science and us earthlings. Stories of early warning from all over the world in this next Waterproof!

Listen to it here:

This episode of Waterproof is all about how modern-day science and age-old indigenous knowledge can be used to solve today’s water crises. So, not one or the other but both, fused together to come up with solutions to our common and increasing problems.
I spoke to Julia Watson, the Australian-American landscape architect who just published a beautiful book on indigenous uses of water all over the world, which can – and should! – be hybridized with modern technology. And I met four water experts from all over the world, all of them members of the largest indigenous delegation ever to the 2025 Stockholm Water Week: a Maya from Mexico, a Fijian, a Sami woman from Sweden, and a native Hawaiian. What do they have in common? “I think the deep spiritual connection to nature, that’s what I’ve come to appreciate more,” said Milika Sobey of Fiji. “Each time I meet with indigenous people, that is brought home to me, that deep spiritual connection to nature.”

Listen to it here:

This 7th episode of the podcast Waterproof for Partners for Water is about activists and campaigners who not only care deeply about water and nature. Water bodies, rivers, forests – they should have legal rights, just like a person. So our speakers jump in urban waterways, they walk the rivers, they write books, they even take governments to court. And some of them even sing songs with the trees and the turtles. All in the service of making sure we have drinkable rivers and swimmable cities.

Listen to it here:

Samen met indigenous gemeenschappen over de hele wereld inventariseerde ontwerper Julia Watson traditionele manieren van omgaan met water. Die blijken vaak verrassend toekomstbestendig. Samen met Wouter van Noort interviewde ik haar voor NRC over haar nieuwe boek, ‘Lo-TEK Water’, waarbij TEK staat voor Traditional Ecological Knowledge. “We zijn in een valse tegenstelling terechtgekomen,” zegt zij. “Óf we willen de natuur overwinnen uit naam van de vooruitgang, het superiority complex, of we willen het redden, het savior complex. Lo-TEK is een beweging die daartussenin zit – een toolkit voor de toekomst, waarbij de natuur de architect is en de mens de ingenieur.” Lees hier het artikel: https://archive.ph/TJFo6 en bekijk hieronder een aantal foto’s.

(Foto Danielle Amy)

“Climate adaptation and water investments have huge economic benefits, but it’s hard to translate that into financial revenue streams”, says International Water Envoy of the Netherlands Meike van Ginneken in this sixth and last episode of Waterproof. “You need ‘patient capital’. And that very quickly gets you to public finance. Governments have a very important role in this, in organizing climate adaptation.”

Water, biodiversity and food: it’s Nature’s Recipe. But how do you keep these important drivers balanced, healthy, profitable and resilient? And what do jaguars and strawberries have to do with it? You’ll find out in this fifth episode of my podcast Waterproof for Partners for Water.

This fourth episode of Waterproof is all about breaking the Build-Neglect-Repair Cycle. As we have called it: Build. Neglect. Repair. Repeat.

With the best intentions, countries from the global north often spend a bundle of money building something that people in developing countries need, or that the donor thinks they need. Then the locals can’t maintain it, or can’t afford to, or they don’t know how. It falls apart, and the donor either has to come back to repair it – or doesn’t come back at all. It’s a vicious circle. 

Once upon a time, Europeans would turn up in emerging countries with mega-infrastructure projects meant to help people. They were well-meaning, but often deaf to what the local populations wanted or needed. Times have changed and, as you’ll hear in this third episode of Waterproof, more and more, the locals run the show! More about the people you’ll hear in the show below: