Albert Cho is executive vice president and chief strategy and external affairs officer at Xylem. He is also a member of Canadian Water Network’s (CWN) Board of Directors. Al delivered a standout address during the plenary session on water security at Blue Cities 2026. His remarks were among the most well-received at the event, and we’re pleased to share key insights with our network.

Water security is a timely and critical discussion.

I’m going to start somewhere a little unexpected: a Supreme Court case in the United States called Jacobellis v. Ohio, where, when asked for the definition of pornography, Justice Potter Stewart said essentially, “I don’t have a definition, but I know it when I see it.”

Water security is the opposite of pornography, in that we know it when we don’t see it. Water security, as a concept, only makes sense when we notice its absence.

As we talk about water security as a strategic priority for the Canadian Water Network, for the Canada Water Agency, and for this country, I want to put it into a couple of contexts.

Let’s start with the national security context. Within the Westphalian tradition, the concept of the nation-state is directly related to security. The idea of security, for a nation-state, is the ability to set one’s own destiny through principles of sovereignty, noninterference, and strategic autonomy. That concept is somewhat militaristic and zero-sum in nature, centred on the state as the primary actor.

In the 1980s and 1990s, this concept of security got connected to water. There were some theorists, including Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute, who started to think about water security as a nexus between water availability and transboundary conflict, where water scarcity is an accelerant of inter-state conflict.

Then, in 1994, with the publication of the UN Human Development Report, this concept of security got turned on its head. It was no longer a concept that was primarily about inter-state relations, but about the concept of human security. This turn was based on the fact that more people were dying from factors like the lack of available food and water than from all of the world’s wars at any given moment in time.

This human security perspective raised an existential question of state legitimacy – are we meeting the needs of individuals to live a fully realized life?

That focus on human security framed water security in a very different sense.

When you look at security over this multi-decadal, even multi-century historical trajectory, the concept of water security provides a synthesis between what I would call a realist conception of security and an idealist conception of security.

That synthesis is both uncomfortable and productive. The concept of water security in the strategic environment in which countries of the world find themselves today is both about how managing water helps us in realizing national security ambitions, and about the ambitions of human security within a particular country’s borders.

As we situate water within national priorities, the concept of water security touches on both of these dimensions of security in a productive way.

I want to move from history to theory, because I would argue that if we’re thinking about water security as a concept that touches on both the realist and the idealist concepts of security, one critical observation is that in a democracy, both processes are democratically mediated.

First, this realist conception of water security as an instrument of national power nests within what our elected leaders do at a federal or national level. Federal and elected leaders generate a national security strategy. They generate a posture of any given country against the other threats that exist in the world. And as we’ll discuss in a little bit, that strategy has implications for how we conduct water at the national, but also at the local level.

Second, as we think about what water security means through the human security lens, it is also democratically mediated but in a different way: primarily through civil society, through dialogue, and through the discovery of what is absent.

If we think about water security as something we cannot see, it reveals itself through a discussion of the constraints, absences, and risks we each face in different experiences in our own lives.

That’s why I think this conversation between Nicola Crawhall and Mark Fisher, between the Canadian Water Agency and the Canadian Water Network, is so important because the discovery of what water security means happens in both of those contexts, both through the context of government, but crucially, through the dialogue between various stakeholders in civil society.

From a theoretical perspective, water security strategy requires three things: dialogue, data, and innovation.

When we talk about dialogue, we’re talking about the discovery and alignment of our water policies, frameworks, and activities within those contexts of the realist and idealist conceptions of what security means. What’s really important in setting a national water strategy is that we’re not talking past each other. Water security is, at least in part, an information problem, because many people don’t know what water we’ve got today, what water we will have in the future, and what the balance between supply and demand, between security and insecurity will look like under various scenarios.

Data is absolutely essential in resolving some of those questions by clarifying boundary conditions and uncertainties. Gemma Boag brought up Australia. Australia is one of these countries that had quite a challenging conversation about managing very scarce water resources in an inter-provincial landscape.

Australia invested rigorously in hydrological baselines and monitoring, which enabled those conversations to focus on what is actually there and how we realistically apportion the resources that exist. The importance of monitoring, visibility and situational awareness, including large-scale hydrological monitoring and at the level of municipal systems, cannot be overstated.

Let’s pause just for the moment to think about a water strategy in service to a national security strategy. Consider major infrastructure investments — guided by national priorities — that ultimately materialize in a specific watershed, in a specific governance context, in a specific municipality. When you elect to build a significant amount of infrastructure in one part of your network, what happens to the rest of it? Do you know? Does it take two years to figure that out through hydraulic analysis? Or can you figure that out through a real-time scenario assessment? What I’m most excited about from a technology perspective and from a visibility perspective is that those questions are getting easier and faster to answer.

I was talking to one of my colleagues, Pablo Calabuig, VP Americas for Xylem Vue, about work we’ve done in municipalities around the world to create real-time digital twins of entire municipal water systems. The hydraulic real-time digital twin in Valencia, Spain, has enabled the city to identify infrastructure problems and save over two billion gallons of water per year in a highly water-stressed region. That level of visibility has created a certain degree of confidence in infrastructure development, which, I think, has emboldened Spain to become a global leader in water management.

We’ve applied that same concept of the digital twin to a number of cities around the world. I’m very excited to note that it will actually be coming to Canada, where some of the use cases pertain directly to this concept as infrastructure develops and growth becomes a national priority. How does new build really affect a highly constrained network? How do you create the headroom, visibility and real-time simulation capability needed to understand how planning decisions nested within this broader strategic context of housing infrastructure investment affect a network’s reliability and scalability? From an information perspective, those capabilities are foundational to the future of water security.

That brings us to the third concept of innovation, and then I’ll get to the Aspen Institute. It’s all kind of related because one of the things we talked about at the Aspen Institute about 10 years ago was the concept of innovation as a strategic enabler of water security.

I want you to envision what I call the impossible trilemma. A trilemma is a triangle with three sides to it, where you can only choose two things. The first one is resilience. We all want resilient systems. The second one is affordability. We know we’ve got budget constraints, and the affordability of our water infrastructure is an increasingly salient topic in political dialogue in pretty much every part of the world. The third part is process stability: we like to do things that are proven because infrastructure matters, and it matters when it doesn’t work.

You’ve got these three things we like in the sector: resilience, affordability, and process stability. I would argue that we can’t have all three of those things because the way we have delivered infrastructure as an industry over the last couple of decades does not enable us to scale to the needs of a resilient future while maintaining the affordability of systems that have to stand the test of time.

We did some really interesting research with Global Water Intelligence that suggested the resilience needs of global water infrastructure will amount to $1.5 trillion over the next couple of decades. The only thing that will make that affordable is the adoption of disruptive, intelligent infrastructure, which has the potential to cut that bill by about half.

If we think about resolving this impossible trilemma between maintaining the resilience of our infrastructure systems, doing so in an affordable manner, because affordability is an aspect of human security, the only way to achieve that impossible trilemma is by disrupting this concept of process stability and becoming more open to the adoption of innovation, including what I just spoke about with respect to digital innovation.

That brings us to the Aspen Institute. It has been engaged for the last two years in a process of creating what I would call a civil society-led national water strategy. The United States hasn’t had a national water strategy for 75 years, so this organization took it upon itself to build a broad, multi-stakeholder coalition of academics, water utilities, industry, agriculture, and many different sectors across the United States economy.

To answer this question of what water security looks like in the United States, they organized six or seven meetings over the course of the year. They created a shared sense of what water security needed to look like in the United States. It crystallized into six core themes, positioning water as an essential component of human and economic security in the United States.

It also created sub-strategies around themes like rural inclusion, technology and innovation, and disaster resilience. Each sub-strategy created a focal point and a shared dialogue that is at least a starting point for understanding what the United States needs to do differently to create a more secure future for the water sector.

I’m not saying it’s a good blueprint for Canada. I think it scored very well on human security dimensions, but probably didn’t fully address how it nests into national security ambitions for the United States. I think Canada has an opportunity to do that differently.

But I did want to share that experience because many of the core principles are the same. It requires multi-stakeholder dialogue, the injection of a lot of information, and the embrace of innovation to create a shared vision of how things will look different in the future to accommodate the changes we all know are coming.

With that, I want to say thank you for the opportunity to listen and to learn from all of you. I look forward to the dialogue.