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Can Wall Street help us find the true price of water?
A chronically underpriced commodity starts trading like gold and pork bellies
A chronically underpriced commodity starts trading like gold and pork bellies
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/water-futures-price-1.5866538"With nearly two-thirds of the world's population expected to face water shortages by 2025, water scarcity presents a growing risk for businesses and communities around the world," said McCourt in a release announcing the new market, which it referred to as "liquid and transparent."
"Climate change, droughts, population growth and pollution are likely to make water scarcity issues and pricing a hot topic for years to come," RBC Capital Markets managing director Deane Dray told Bloomberg Green after the CME water market began trading. "We are definitely going to watch how this new water futures contract develops."
But as Diane Dupont, a long-time water economist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., points out, in most cases, the water itself costs nothing for municipal and large industrial users, and that creates problems of its own.
"Typically, they're paying a very low fee," said Dupont, author of Running Through Our Fingers: How Canada Fails to Capture the Value of its Top Asset. "They're not paying the value of the water."