Dive into the blue world with documentary producer, Paul O'Callaghan

Water has always been a part of my life. I grew up on a small island in the Atlantic ocean, Ireland, which is surrounded by water and we have a lot of water falling on it in the form of rain, and wherever I lived – in Vancouver, similar situation, Kuala Lumpur, tropical rains – it’s been a very important aspect of my life and I derived a lot of pleasure from it.

That’s how I spend my spare time – in the water! It’s what I’ve devoted my professional life to and I could think of nothing better than to make a film about water. It was logical to focus on telling stories about water, so that I could inspire others to appreciate it, value it, seize the opportunity to improve the current situation and deal with the challenges that we face in relation to water.

Providing clean water and sanitation is a very noble goal. However, how we go about it determines whether or not we’re going to be able to reach that goal. In many ways, I feel as if we’re often trying to solve an unsolvable problem and we need to reimagine it in a way that it can be achievable. Sometimes that means doing things in a completely different way by looking at local solutions or alternative business models. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that the clean water goal assumes there’s water there. But we cannot assume that there’s 200 litres of water for every man, woman and child out there. People want access to sanitation and safe drinking water, but if we focus on the other sustainable development goals - 6.3 to 6.6 - which is really to focus on the habitats, the quality of the rivers, wetlands or lakes, then we go a long way towards ensuring that the water is there and that it is clean and safe.

The solutions to the global water crisis, as we see in Brave Blue World, are all around us. They’re all very local. And increasingly I believe that those solutions are also behind us, many of them are in our past. Fog-catching has been practiced for hundreds of years whilst in Iran they built amazing networks of qanats which is still used to this day. In Peru, pre-Inca civilisations had canals that worked with the seasons to be able to store water during monsoons for the dry periods. The Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq, they coped with storms that raised sea levels by living on the water in floating civilizations. In many ways, if we look at how people have lived in harmony with the seasons and nature with water for millennia, there may be some clues for how modern technology can mirror and even work in harmony with that.

Water governance and policy are hugely important. We’ve seen this in the energy space. Countries like Germany became leaders in solar energy and Lord knows there’s not that much sunshine in Germany compared to some other parts of the world. And yet through good policy they created demand, that demand created mass production which drove down costs and eventually it becomes mainstream. We need something similar for water. Currently there’s a “green premium” in the energy sector. There should be a blue premium in the water sector. If we want to use grey water, rainwater, reuse quality water, we need to have the right policies and the right instruments that drive the market in that direction. It will get close to parity over time, there’s no doubt about it, but sometimes it does need that level of creating the environment so that those changes can occur.

We should be optimistic based on the evidence. We have provided access to drinking water and sanitation for 2 billion more people since the 1980s. We have lifted people out of poverty in the same time period and if we look forward there’s every reason to believe that we can achieve this. It may not be in exactly the way we anticipated, or we may have to take different approach in different situations, but overwhelmingly you’ve got to be able to believe simultaneously that there is a problem which is getting worse and at the same hold on to the idea that that it’s getting better and we can make progress. I am particularly optimistic about the next ten years in that regard.

It’s a song about rain because I think we all need to love the rain and embrace it. It’s a good thing. There’s a song by the Beatles called ‘Rain’. It talks about how, when it rains, we cover our heads and run for shelter and when the sun shines, we sip a lemonade. That’s a lovely message to send. Look we need to embrace them both. They’re both part of the weather, there’re both part of the system. So let’s embrace the rain as much as the sun!