Bonus: Game Changers, Part 2

and global resources. Will get a peek behind the curtains of their factory floors here of the sometimes surprising origins of their ideas, and be introduced to a potentially greener tomorrow. In this episode, water Harvesting. The Mexico City metropolitan area, home to twenty two million people, is densely populated and heavily traffic A visitor walking on its bustling streets might be surprised to learn what lies underneath it. We are

not in a vali, We're actually in a basin. That's Dr Manuel parallel Cohen, a full time researcher at the Institute of Social Investigations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. We are on the top of lakes, but we don't see those lakes. This is also a basin where many rivers flow into the lower parts of the city, and you could see those rivers. Nowadays you see only highways

with the name of those rivers. Founded in the fourteenth century, then known as Tenochtitland, Mexico City was initially built on a tiny island in the Valley of Mexico. Over the course of the last four hundred years, the city focused on draining the water as it was expanding its borders, and it's been efficient. Where once there was a lake now stands one of the vastest cities in the world.

But this doesn't mean the city is all dry. Mexico City gets more rain yearly than the notoriously wet London, and beneath its streets you'll find enormous aquifers. We have around eighteen hundred deep whales that provide that water, and we import also water from distant basis. So you have to realize that we have the largest water infrastructure, perhaps in the world, both to prevent the city from floods, but at the same time to provide water to those

twenty two point five million inhabitants. Knowing this, it might seem paradoxical that Mexico City in many ways is lacking water. Those aquifers have been over exploited over the years. We which means that we take more water than the one that percolates into those aquifers. They are not imbalanced. We draw too much water from them. A crumbling infrastructure isn't making things easier about. The water produced by the system is lost through leaks. All this combined has led to

a crisis in this naturally water abundant area. Mexico City is one of the top ten cities in the world at risk of running out of water. There are at least one million people in Mexico City who live in areas that are that are not suited for infrastructure, so it's very difficult to bring the water through the bipelines. It's it's almost impossible. That's only in Mexico City. I'm

not talking about Mexico Cities metropolitan area. And those people who are most hurt are the people who live in the worst conditions, the poor people, because they live in the worst located places. On the one hand, but on the other hand, poor people really don't have places where to store water. You know, living without water is something that if you've never actually experienced, it's hard to imagine not and it dominates your life. This is in Reque.

Lomnitz one of the co founders and general director of Isla Urbana, a project dedicated to developing water sustainability in Mexico City. So, especially low income parts of Mexico City, peripheral parts of Mexico City and the people that live around it are now facing a situation where they open the top and no water comes out or brown water

comes out for a few seconds. So if you live in a house that doesn't get water or gets water just once every you know, one or two weeks, water starts becoming this really central dynamic that takes over almost all of the house now, So everybody is very very

attentive to when there's water. So if there's water in the good for a moment, everybody runs out and tries to fill up all of the buckets and containers that they possibly can so that they can kind of hold over for however long they need to until they get water again, which they never know when there's gonna be

water again. You know, about ten years ago in Regue and one of its co founders, both industrial designers, were discussing ways to support sustainability issues in the low income parts of Mexico City, with no clear ideas in mind. They started interviewing people about their everyday lives and water started coming up over and over and over again. People just started telling us about out water, and they start telling us about how their water situation was getting worse

and worse. They started telling us how they, you know, they used to get water out of the grid maybe two three times a week. Now they're getting water one day every two weeks. How they never used to buy water trucks, now they're buying several water trucks a year. The water trucks are an attempt to put a band aid on the wound. The government subsidizes water trucks for

low income places. So maybe you have to go to like a government agency order a water truck, and but they'll tell you, you know, you'll get your water truck in two to four weeks, for example, and no idea when so a lot of houses actually have to have somebody at home all the time in case the water truck shows up. So that they can receive it not because if not they don't, they lose. They lose the water truck and their place in the line. Enrique and

his colleagues zeroed in on an idea. Instead of getting water by truck or from below, how about looking to the sky. There's nothing new about rainwater harvesting, and people have been harvesting rainwater since they first kind of like open their mouths and looked up at the sky. At the same time, notice that there's rainwater harvesting systems that

are six thousand years old throughout the world. But um, but I don't think anyone had really taken the challenge of how do we get a modern, massive metropolis to start harvesting rainwater on a massive scale. The team built their first rainwater harvesting system, a simple and cheap arrangement made up of a big plastic water tank installed on the ground level, gutters, some pipes, and a filter hooked up on the roof. One of the women they had

interviewed agreed to try it out. And this woman, who I think is very scientifically minded, Uh, shut off the city grid, the water, the city water connection. She said, let's see how we do just with rainwater. Not even the East lat Urbana team expected the outcome. And they went eight months, eight continuous months before they had to open up the city grid again. So they did eight

continuous months of full autonomy just on rainwater. And that was like a that blew up in my mind and and and this my co founder Renata, who I was working with it it kind of blew our minds. We're like, okay, this is this is really good, Like this really works beyond what we kind of had imagined. The team rented a room across the street from the first installment and proceeded to organize community meetings. A bunch of the neighbors

started like joining in kind of none. We started installing rainwater harvesting systems with our neighbors little by little, and you know, it was a very want at a time, very retail kind of community activism kind of work, talking to communities about rainwater harvesting and and people you know, like agreeing to experiments. So we start experimenting with different rainwater harvesting systems, and um we started putting up more and more and more of these systems in the area.

As the word spread, the local government got in touch and they came back and they said, um, could you please write us a quote for five rainwater harvesting systems. And this was the first time anybody had asked us for like a quote, and so we like, we're very excited, and we wrote a very um a very like low budget. You know, we just wanted them to to to accept the quote now. So we wrote this quote for five systems, and they came back and they said, okay, we want

five hundreds of these systems. And so we were like terrified, no and very excited, but also like, okay, how do we do this? And that was this huge quantum kind of step for us, and we installed. We ended up installing close to a thousand rainwater harvesting systems, working directly

with this local administration. By now, a decade after installing the first unit, East La Urbana are working directly with the government of Mexico City, installing almost sixties systems a day throughout the metropolitan area, over twenty thousand or out there, harvesting a total of eight hundred and seven million liters of water annually. For the recipients of these units, this

can be truly life changing. So if you have a house that has say a hundred square meter roof stay, which would be what um nine square feet or something like that. It's not it's not a huge house at all. It's the house like that can get up to around a hundred thousand liters of water per year, which is about twelve water trucks. The problem at that point becomes they just don't have enough tanks to store it all.

Like actually, they'll use as much water as they can store, and they'll go the whole rainy season and they'll usually go five, six, seven, eight months a year. They can be water autonomous. Now, it's that depending on the size of their roof. And then houses that have bigger tanks. I mean, there's houses that go all year, and that's

really what we're after now. No, it's just doing more and more rainwater harvesting systems and getting entire parts of Mexico City to become places where every time it rains, just thousands and thousands of rainwater harvesting tanks just fill up with water. For his part, Dr Perlo sees new models being developed and it makes him optimistic about the future. We're not going to be able to return to the old lake, say stem or the old Teno Stitland, the

Aztec city in the middle of the lake. That's gone. But we can have a new water model for the city, a model where we keep water, a model where we have enough water. We have springs, we have rivers, we have small lakes, we have hydraulic parks. We have really uh world of water. And that's possible. It's not utopia, it's not something that comes out of a dream. It can be a reality. This episode of Game Changers was produced by Magnus Hendrickson and presented by Yours Truly Matt Goldman.

It was based on recording by Tom Gibson. For a visual experience of Games Drangers, check out our videos at bloomberg dot com slash Green. Francesca Levie is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. See you next time.