If no price is put on water, innovation and water conservation will be discouraged, he said.
President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who is also co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, in dialogue with Temasek's Robin Hu.
It can provide a broader picture of development and economic progress than standard measures such as gross domestic product. Heavy users of water such as drinks manufacturers – “Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Heineken and so on” – now realise that their business is unsustainable “unless they invest upstream in the natural catchments, help farmers to use water more efficiently and treat that as part of their business model”, Mr Tharman said.
“It knows that it has to preserve sustainability upstream, not just in the plant where it’s doing the manufacturing or the processing,” he added. “We’ve got to know where it is, we’ve got to know every resource that leads to this supply for water, and we’ve got to value it. If we don’t value it, there’s no incentive to preserve it.”
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