Water Talks is a podcast about water: too much, too little, too dirty and … too unequal. During the UN Water conference, the first one in almost 50 years, and the New York Water Week, I spoke to a diverse group of people in New York and the Netherlands – artists, activists, academics, engineers, policy makers – about how we can and should move forward in order to save ourselves and our planet from the water crisis. This is the fifth episode: Too Unequal.

It is about the tension between water as a source of profit and water as a basic human right. After all, if clean water has to be profitable, some people, lots of people, are sure to lose out. As the director of UN Habitat, Maimunah Mohd Sharif is dedicated to helping the global south get access to clean water and sanitation.  

Do we need big business to build the big infrastructure that brings clean water and safety to everyone? Thad Pawlowski of Columbia University and ‘constructive activist’ Murtah Shannon of Both Ends say: absolutely not. 

This show is about climate justice.

The following five episodes of Water Talks are long-form interviews with some of the people I spoke with, who had so many interesting things to say that we wanted to give them more airtime: the Netherlands’ Special Envoy for International Water Affairs for Henk Ovink, historian Russell Shorto, architect and urban designer Matthijs Bouw, landscape architect Kate Orff and Chief Climate Officer of New York City Rohit Aggarwala.