By Dean Amhaus, President & CEO
The Water Council and Marquette University’s Sustainability Lab held our first-ever Nexus Sustainability Leaders Summit last week, and what a way to kick off a new event! Nearly 200 people gathered at the Harley-Davidson Museum to discuss pressing topics in water and energy, including climate resilience, meeting the needs for the energy transition, the role of artificial intelligence in water and energy, and sustainable finance.
This event built on our annual Water Leaders Summit and Marquette’s Sustainability 2.0 Conference. The launch of the Nexus Summit allowed us to reach new audiences, expand our topic pool and work with the talented Marquette team.
One of my strongest takeaways from the summit is that change is happening more quickly than ever. We began with an interview of Katie McGinty, chief sustainability officer at Johnson Controls. Our moderator, Charles Fishman, began the session by showing an article from 1997, when McGinty was working in the Clinton White House and arguing that addressing climate change doesn’t have to come at the expense of economic progress. She hasn’t always won that battle in the last 30 years, but the tide is definitely turning now.
“It’s no longer environment or business,” she said. “It’s ‘my business depends on the environment.'”
The topics discussed at the summit — including AI, nuclear energy and green banks — aren’t brand new, but they are generating much more enthusiasm and discussion than they were even a year or two ago.
Attendees were also able to get in on the discussion through our small-group roundtables, where we discussed challenges to water and energy innovation and potential solutions. Even here, AI has changed the game. We collected notes from each of the roundtables (more than 40 pages in all) and asked Balamurugan Balakreshnan, chief AI architect at Microsoft and a speaker at the summit, to use AI to create a summary of the discussions. Below is the result. I think you’ll find it highly interesting.
Everyone who attended the summit will receive a post-event survey soon, and we invite your honest feedback. (Feel free to contact us directly by email.) Stay tuned for details of next year’s event!
General Barriers:
Sector-Specific Barriers:
Role of Pilot Projects:
Strategies to Overcome Barriers:
This approach aims to accelerate innovation while balancing safety, scalability, and public buy-in.