Committed to the power of private enterprise to foster positive social change. It's already a clich that water is at once our most precious and most abundant asset. Many years ago Adam Smith pointed out that water, which is vital for life, costs nothing, whereas diamonds, useless for life, are valued highly. Water is everywhere.
All life depends on water-indeed, life probably began in water .
It is also a clich to say that the world is not short of water, but rapidly running short of usable water if all the earth's water were stored in a 5-litre container, available fresh water would not quite fill a teaspoon. Marq de Villiers, Water Wars, 1999. The combination of technology and population growth is beginning to require allocation mechanisms among these competing demands. Additionally, usable water's unequal geographic availability, as well as pollution impacts, even on available water, is driving research into alleviating technologies. As is often the case, price is becoming a more universal method for allocating between uses for water and for generating new technologies.