In the 21st century, “investing in water” has garnered more and more attention, as water scarcity grows more widespread. To get a better understanding of how the environmental community thinks about the use of private capital to address water’s challenges, this case draws on conversations with Brian Richter, president of Sustainable Waters and lecturer at the University of Virginia. As part of his leadership of the Nature Conservancy’s water program, Richter founded an investment fund to buy water rights in Australia’s drought-prone Murray-Darling Basin; with the fluctuations in prices of water rights (due to Australia’s proportional water-rights system), the fund could donate water to wetlands in wet years and make very high returns for its investors in dry years. But Richter found a very different situation when he tried to start a similar fund for the Colorado River, which was also experiencing significant drought, given both the very different US legal landscape and resistance among investors and local communities.
At the Darden School of Business, this case is taught in the second-year elective, “Global Economics of Water."
