Resilience is becoming one of the defining challenges for the global water sector, with climate change, biodiversity loss, population growth and financial uncertainty placing increasing pressure on the systems communities depend upon.
For Paul Chatterton, founder of the Landscape Finance Lab, the pathway forward starts with recognising water as much more than a sector-specific issue, but as central to resilience for every sector.
A global platform pioneering new approaches to financing sustainable landscapes and environmental restoration, the Landscape Finance Lab works to unlock investment into nature, climate resilience and long-term sustainability.
Chatterton has led major environmental initiatives across the world, including forest carbon programs in the Congo and Borneo, rainforest conservation projects in New Guinea, river protection initiatives in central Europe and peatland restoration financing across the UK and Ireland.
Speaking at Ozwater’26, Chatterton said the water sector has a critical role to play in shaping resilience for future generations.
“The question we’re asking ourselves is: what decisions do we need to make now to achieve water resilience for future generations?” he said.
“But I want to go even bigger with my hypothesis and suggest that the water sector is not simply one sector among many working on resilience. Water is the organising system for resilience across all sectors.
“That’s my intuition. I’m not a specialist in water, but working across so many different sectors, I’m convinced that water is what connects us all.”
Chatterton said water’s role in resilience extends across climate, biodiversity, energy, landscapes, cities, finance and communities.
Chatterton said emerging science is strengthening the case for treating nature as central to water resilience, not separate from it.
“We all know that more habitat means more water retention. But what I didn’t realise is that more biodiversity in a landscape means a more resilient hydrological system," he said.
“More soil microbial life means more water storage, more fertility and more food security.”
For Chatterton, this means future water resilience must be built through a more integrated approach to land, water and nature.
“If we follow the science, the focus for water resilience has to be a combined one, including increasing habitat, biodiversity, soil carbon and so much more,” he said.
“That depends on rebuilding natural water systems while we’re building our city water systems and our water supply systems.”
This shift does not require the sector to abandon existing approaches, Chatterton said, but rather to connect them more effectively and build in green solutions.
“We can do that without actually changing too much of what we do day to day,” he said.
“It’s not about doing something new. It’s about shifting our heads slightly, taking a slightly different perspective, and putting it all together in a much more connected way.”
This approach was illustrated through Chatterton’s discussion of the Flow Country in the far north-east of Scotland, the world’s largest blanket bog.
“It’s actually quite a small landscape, about the size of the city of Brisbane. This landscape stores more carbon than all of the forests and woodlands of the United Kingdom combined,” he said.
“It’s under intense pressure, but there’s a whole effort at the moment to get carbon payments into the landscape to restore the peatlands.”
However, Chatterton said nature-based solutions must be designed carefully if they are to support communities as well as ecosystems.
“The flip side of the story is a really important one, I think, for Australia and the world,” he said.
“Scotland has one of the most concentrated patterns of land ownership in the world. Four hundred and thirty-two people own half of Scotland, would you believe? The carbon finance is making the rich people richer. It’s an elite game, and it’s making the poor very angry.
“So this is something that we have to find a solution to as we build nature-based solutions, invest in restoring nature and rebuild water systems. We have to proceed very carefully with how we invest in and build water resilience. And Scotland achieved this by building a landscape scale solution that allows the small farmers and crofters to benefit equally with the large estate owners within a community held framework.”
Chatterton said one of the key barriers to meaningful resilience is the continued reliance on isolated, project-by-project approaches.
“The key story is that project-by-project approaches are not sufficient to address the challenge of climate change,” he said.
“They’re not sufficient to reconnect nature in the way it needs, and they can also be very socially divisive.”
Instead, Chatterton said the scale of the challenge requires landscape and catchment-scale models that can bring together multiple benefits, partners and investment streams in a fair manner.
“Landscapes are the solution from the point of view of the conservation world. They’re the solution for dealing with nature at the scale at which it operates," he said.
From a finance perspective, Chatterton said landscape approaches can help create the scale needed to attract investment.
“We’re finding they’re very useful for finance because they allow you to go from small investments of perhaps $10 million up to the $100 million scale that gets the bankers out of bed,” he said.
“They also allow you, as you start looking at connecting the different pieces, to build synergies between different activities and sectors. That’s really important in creating greater value in a catchment or landscape.
“With the polycrisis, including all of these crazy challenges in climate, nature, food fragility, governance and water risk coming down the pipeline, our landscapes are the Swiss Army knife for dealing with them all together,” he said.
“We have very few Swiss Army knives to deal with these large challenges, and we need integrated, large-scale solutions. Landscapes offer those.”
Chatterton said the methodology for building landscape-scale solutions is not overly complex, but it must be led by the people within those landscapes.
“The first step is to bring together a landscape partnership, identify the core problem they want to deal with, and come to a common understanding of possible solutions," he said.
“Then reach a vision and an action plan, get the finance, take action, and monitor and learn.”
As global nature finance evolves, Chatterton said, Australia is well positioned to help shape its next phase.
“Australia has a remarkable place in the world in creating resilience solutions. It’s one of the world leaders in integrated approaches to water, climate and nature finance. You can be quite proud of the work that’s already happening," he said.
“You’ve got the governance capacity, the institutional capital, the world-class water expertise and the landscapes that matter globally.
“So Australia could be in a position to shape the world’s approach to resilience.”
He pointed to work already underway in south-east Queensland, including the ENVestor program developed with Healthy Land and Water focused on restoring river habitat along the Brisbane River and reducing flooding.
“What this showed at the sub-catchment level is that nature-based solutions, replanting forests along rivers and on hillsides, are not only good for platypus and koalas, but also excellent for reducing flood impacts,” he said.
“They reduce topsoil wash-off from farms, and flood damage is much lower in those catchments. Can we do that across all of Brisbane? That’s the question now being asked.”
For Chatterton, Australia’s existing catchment management structures are a significant advantage: “Australia has catchment management authorities, NRM regions and a whole series of very strong institutions. Very few countries have that".
Achieving water resilience for future generations is a major task, but one the sector is well placed to take on, Chatterton said.
“Imagining water resilience for future generations is a massive task. But I don’t think it means changing too much of what we do. We just need to change how we see it and how we do it together.
“We have to think about landscapes. We have to think about systems. We have to think about integration. We need to shift from thinking about infrastructure in nature, to thinking about nature as the infrastructure."
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