"Water: The Most Important Thing You Know Nothing About"
With Jose R Castro

Most people don't think about water. You turn on the tap, it works. Job done.

The job's not done. Water sits quietly at the centre of almost every major challenge of the next fifty years: climate change, geopolitical conflict, AI, food security, public health. And most of us have almost no mental model for how it actually works as a system.

This talk is a tour of that system: where water comes from, where it's going, and why the decisions being made right now will determine whether the next generation has enough of it, and whether it's safe to drink. We'll cover why water 'scarcity' is almost entirely a political problem rather than a physical one; why upwards of two billion people drink water every day that would fail a basic safety test; how water has quietly become one of the most contested commodities in global finance; and where the genuinely exciting solutions are actually coming from.

No prior knowledge required. Just curiosity and, ideally, a pint.