OPPORTUNITIES TO CONNECT AND NEW VALUE CHAINS

“If you do not understand your role in the problem, it is difficult to be part of the solution”
- David Peter Stroh

Although long-term thinking is often seen as an obstacle to decisive action in the short term, long-term perspectives often offer openings for more fundamental rethinking in the light of complex and, in this case, very costly challenges. For example, short-term thinking about solutions will often get stuck in the immobility of the depreciation period of infrastructure. Since, especially in economic terms, you are bound to the choices that are at the base of that infrastructure. As long as it is not depreciated, there is a tendency to take that infrastructure as a framework for reflection. For example, water treatment plants reflect an assumption that you only tackle pollution at the end of the chain, and make the costs of this treatment equitable, for example through taxes or levies. The model in Denmark, on the other hand, is based on the idea that intervening at source can drastically reduce the need and costs of water treatment, while at the same time achieving a better match between responsibility and cost-sharing (the polluter pays).

But what if you shift the perspective beyond investment cycles, or fit your planned investments into other solution frameworks? What if you put the money for the planned renewal of a new sewerage system into a design exercise as an investment budget for a decentralised water management system, so that the sewerage system becomes superfluous? What if a subsidy for circular shower systems would support the energy transition, because people need a less expensive heat pump and a smaller hot water storage tank, thereby making the complete sustainability of their homes more feasible? In other words: what if you combine objectives and share the means to achieve them?

There are so many gains to be made when you can see the connections between different dynamics and transitions, and get to grips with how, on the new playing field that is then created, there are many opportunities to combine challenges, so that the common solution becomes more feasible than separate solutions for the individual challenges, which in themselves often flounder because there is no business or value model. But that takes practice. And experiment. Here are some possible ways to encourage opportunities for practice and experiment.

Drawing up competitions for creative solutions to systemic issues, such as:

- How do we detach an increase in water consumption from an increase in (and concentration of) wastewater?
- How do we avoid that rising demand for cooling energy production results in the warming up of our watercourses?
- How can the construction of infrastructure increase infiltration?
- How can food production increase water capital?
- How can increasing inland navigation increase water availability?

Creating an agenda of opportunities to combine, by organising own co-creation workshops to detect such opportunities. For example, in the water-energy nexus. In order to meet the climate targets, a major renovation wave is needed to make our buildings more energy efficient. In the context of the proposed recovery plan (2020), a label bonus and an interest-free renovation credit (where the interest burden is borne via advance payments from the Energy Fund and the Climate Fund) will be used to entice as many new owners as possible to comprehensively renovate their homes in the area of energy. Saving water is an important lever for energy-related renovation. Where are the opportunities, models, combinations of policy instruments? The ones where we can convert opportunities for connections into more impact?

We are setting up a scanning process in which we will search for opportunities to connect systemic changes in the various systems at the water-food-energy intersection.