After Climate Week NYC: 10 Water Realities Shaping Business Decisions

At Climate Week NYC 2026, our team came away with a sense of impatience. Expectations of institutional and political support were running up against experience. Alongside that frustration was a stronger willingness to take ownership: find workable solutions, understand the constraints and get on with the work.

The conversations we joined dealt with immediate pressures on water use. Drinking water, agriculture, and data centers can place competing demands on the same system. Understanding those trade-offs is part of deciding what can happen next.

We left with a question that applies well beyond the water sector:

Can the places a business depends on meet today’s needs and support the future it is planning?

That question reaches into where companies build, what they grow, how they source and where they invest. Answering it requires looking beyond a company’s own water use to the systems that make its operations possible.

These ten observations draw on those conversations, published developments from the week, and supporting research. Where we draw a business implication from that evidence, we explain our reasoning.

1. Water belongs in the business plan.

The conditions around an operation can change the economics within it.

Water targets and disclosures serve an important purpose. Companies also need to know whether their assumptions about supply, cost, and continuity hold up where they operate today and intend to grow. That means examining their needs alongside those of other water users and identifying where a proposed decision could intensify an existing constraint.

PwC’s Climate Week recap described a more practical business conversation, focused on the resources and operational changes needed to deliver on commitments. For water, the implication is practical: assess the constraints while there is still time to change the plan. PwC’s Climate Week recap.

Data centers, infrastructure and finance

2. AI’s growth plans need a water assessment.

Cooling choices and location belong in the same discussion.

At Climate Week, TNFD introduced a practical assessment example examining water dependencies and risks across the AI value chain. Its scope includes data centers and semiconductor manufacturing, making clear that the question extends beyond the cooling requirements of an individual facility. TNFD and NatureFinance’s assessment.

For developers and investors, the useful question is how a proposed design will perform in a particular location, under changing conditions and alongside other demands on the water system. A water-use estimate needs that context before it can adequately inform a siting decision.

3. Insurance coverage leaves a second question: what exposure remains?

The financial consequences of flooding extend beyond damaged property.

Flood losses can include interrupted revenue, disrupted suppliers and emergency expenses. Deductibles, exclusions and coverage limits affect how much of that loss a business retains. Swiss Re identifies these gaps as a continuing challenge for recovery. Swiss Re’s flood-risk overview.

The implication for investment analysis is to examine the physical exposure and the available protection together. A policy’s existence does not, by itself, tell an investor how well an asset can withstand a disruption.

4. A flood-zone boundary cannot answer every flood question.

Heavy rainfall makes drainage and surrounding conditions consequential.

Flooding can occur outside mapped high-risk areas. Intense rain, poor drainage and changes in nearby development can all contribute. National Flood Insurance Program.

A site assessment therefore needs to consider how water could reach the property, where it would accumulate and what might prevent it from draining. Elevation, soil conditions and infrastructure help explain an exposure that a single map designation cannot fully describe.

Agriculture and food systems

5. A productive growing region can still be drawing down its future water supply.

Current yields do not establish long-term water reliability.

Groundwater depletion can increase pumping costs, reduce well yields and affect connected rivers and streams. These changes can develop over years, while purchasing decisions continue to focus on the next season. USGS on groundwater decline.

For food businesses, that creates a mismatch between the horizon of a sourcing relationship and the information used to evaluate it. A region’s water trajectory deserves a place alongside its current output and price.

6. Water efficiency at your facility does not establish resilience across your supply chain.

The dependency may sit several suppliers away.

A processing plant can improve its own water performance while remaining dependent on crops grown in a stressed watershed. CDP’s supply-chain research documents the business significance of water risks beyond companies’ direct operations. CDP’s supply-chain water report.

Consumer-goods companies we heard from described persistent difficulty tracing materials through their supply chains. Fragmented tracking technologies, questions about data ownership, and inconsistent standards can make information costly to obtain and difficult to compare.

Establishing where a purchase originates can take substantial work before an analyst can assess the water conditions supporting it. Any gaps should be explicit. A supplier that cannot be traced has not been shown to be resilient.

7. Available water and usable water are different measures.

Quality can change how much of a supply is fit for purpose.

Water quality received less attention than scarcity and stress in the sessions we attended. It still belongs in an assessment of usable supply. USGS identifies water-quality degradation as a constraint on water availability for people, agriculture and ecosystems. The relevant limits depend on the intended use. USGS water-quality assessment.

For a food operation, assessing volume without quality leaves a basic question unanswered: can this water support the process that needs it? Treatment requirements and changing upstream conditions belong in the assessment before the business relies on the supply.

Consultancies, advisory firms and risk managers

8. A company-wide water total can hide the places that need attention.

Location and timing determine what an intervention can accomplish.

Water stewardship needs to account for conditions in the affected basin. An improvement elsewhere should not automatically be treated as reducing an operation’s local exposure. CDP’s freshwater guidance emphasizes the connection between corporate action and the surrounding water system. CDP’s water-stewardship guidance.

One proposal we heard was collaboration across a basin: businesses, public organizations, and other water users working on shared conditions beyond their individual operations. A common geographic focus can help participants agree on what to measure and where collective action could make a difference.

Making that collaboration work requires agreement on what participants will share, how progress will be assessed, and who is responsible for acting. Advisers can help establish those terms while preserving the local detail that makes the work useful.

9. Capital allocation needs a shared understanding of water conditions.

Investment decisions become easier to examine when their evidence and assumptions are visible.

We also heard calls for shared water intelligence to support decisions about where capital should go. A basin-level assessment can give different organizations a common starting point for examining constraints, comparing possible interventions, and discussing priorities.

TNFD’s LEAP approach connects the identification of dependencies and impacts with risk assessment, response, and reporting. That sequence provides a useful discipline: understand the relationship, assess its significance, and determine what to do. TNFD’s worked LEAP example.

That assessment should expose its assumptions and uncertainty, and remain useful after the report is delivered. When a supplier changes, a site expands, or new evidence becomes available, decision-makers need to know which conclusions still hold and which investments merit another look.

10. Shared data needs shared meaning.

Organizations also need to agree on the question, the measures, and the intended outcome.

A rainfall forecast, a groundwater record, and an asset register each answer different questions. Examining them together for a particular location and time horizon can help a company understand the conditions affecting its operations.

Fragmented information was only part of the difficulty participants described in moving beyond small pilots. Terminology and goals also differed. Even when organizations can access the same data, they may use different definitions of success or work toward different outcomes.

Those differences need to be resolved openly. Better evidence can help people evaluate an intervention, but they still need to agree on what success means and who will do the work.

Business plans meet in the same watershed

Taken together, these observations suggest a blind spot in business planning: decisions evaluated separately can depend on the same water, infrastructure, and surrounding conditions. A data center’s expansion, a food company’s sourcing plan, and a community’s drinking-water needs may each look workable on their own while placing competing demands on a shared supply. A portfolio spread across companies or sectors may therefore be less diversified than it appears. Our conclusion is that water intelligence needs to test whether those plans can work together, under changing conditions and over the periods they depend on. That gives businesses a stronger basis for deciding where to invest, which assumptions to revisit, and where cooperation could protect the conditions they all need.

Moving past the data hunt

At True Elements, we have built TrueQi® around this work. It brings water evidence, physics-informed modeling and environmental science into a connected context for investigating sites, watersheds, supply chains and portfolios. Teams can examine conditions together, explore relationships that are difficult to see in separate sources and revisit the analysis as evidence or assumptions change. How TrueQi® works.

Argus™ helps analysts, asset managers, and advisers investigate that context, organize findings and trace them to supporting evidence and model outputs. The aim is to reduce repeated preparation so experts have more time to test assumptions and consider the consequences. Technology can support a shared understanding; people still need to agree on priorities, data-sharing arrangements, and action. The responsibility for the decision remains with them.