Water & Desalination

Water covers most of our planet, yet billions of people lack reliable access to clean drinking water. That tension sits at the center of every conversation in this collection. On The Grove, Earth Onward's climate-tech interview series, water and desalination come up again and again because the problem refuses to stay in the background. Population growth, prolonged droughts, and aging infrastructure are pushing communities to the edge, and the pressure to find scalable solutions has never been higher.

The throughline across these episodes is not just technology. It is the harder question underneath: who builds the systems that will determine who gets water, at what cost, and on what timeline? Guests like Sachin Nair of Hydron bring a founder's perspective to that question, walking through the real tradeoffs in desalination, from energy intensity to brine disposal to financing structures in water-stressed markets.

What you get from spending time in this vertical is a grounded understanding of where water innovation actually stands today. Not hype, not doom, but an honest look at what is working, what is still early, and what the path to scale looks like for technologies that could reshape how cities and regions source their most essential resource. Whether you arrived here with a technical background or just a growing concern about water security, these conversations are a useful place to start.