Desalination is a mature technology, but in parts of the world such as the U.S., it has been slow to scale. The sector has made progress on reducing energy use and brine management, and membrane technologies continue to improve. The question is how to move beyond debating whether to build the first plant, not the fifth.
This is a business ecosystem problem, and it’s similar to my work in corporate water stewardship. Designing a business ecosystem to address watershed health requires assembling innovative technology companies, investors, public sector, civil society and non-governmental organizations. Collective action is the accepted business ecosystem framework in corporate water stewardship strategies.
We have built upon the work to date with collective action and business ecosystems to craft “catalytic communities.” In my view, the catalytic community framework design can be helpful to accelerate the adoption of desalination technologies through commercial partnerships between the stakeholders backed by risk tolerant capital.
What is a catalytic community?
The complexity of the hydrologic cycle coupled with human interventions requires diverse stakeholders to cooperate in developing solutions to address water scarcity, poor quality and access to water for human use and for healthy watersheds. This reality has been apparent for some time, which has given rise to frameworks such as collective action. But as the impact of climate change on the hydrologic cycle becomes more severe, frameworks for partnerships also need to also evolve to deliver innovative technologies and funding and financing strategies at speed and scale.
Catalytic communities are distinct in their focus on driving innovative solutions to wicked water problems, with speed and at scale, by enabling and supporting commercial partnerships between diverse stakeholders and corporations who rely on access to water for business continuity and growth. The early applications of catalytic communities provide a promising model for developing innovative solutions such as desalination to our increasingly complex, and urgent, water challenges.
Every catalytic community will look different depending on the partners, water realities, and broader context of a location. Despite this variation, we identified seven characteristics that are common to most catalytic communities (Adapted from Tom Higley, Founder and CEO of X- Genesis, 2023).
- Bias for Action
Prioritize action over inaction with a focus on taking swift and decisive steps rather than being paralyzed by indecision or over analysis.
- Challenging the Status Quo
Willingness to challenge conventional thinking and explore alternative approaches or perspectives to address problems or pursue opportunities.
- Diverse Perspectives
Diverse participants communicate with one another and share insights that arise from the context of particular perspectives and experiences.
- Shared Purpose
A common goal or shared purpose that catalyzes connection, communication, collaboration, and learning.
- Creation
The creation of one or more valuable, problem-solving things (organizations, entities, movements, tools, products) that did not previously exist and could not have been created without the support of the catalytic community.
Desalination Catalytic Communities
The key stakeholders for a desalination catalytic community are as follows.
- The innovator.This is the key element in a desalination catalytic community, a innovative technology provider. The company needs capital and market access to get past the second or third installation.
- The end user.Coastal utilities, industrial water users, agricultural operations in water-stressed basins, are essential partners as they have the offtake agreements, permitting relationships, and the scale to turn a pilot into a program. In freshwater catalytic communities, this role is typically played by major corporates. In desalination, I’d argue the water utility deserves equal billing, because permitting and public acceptance are often the harder constraint than the technology itself.
- Catalytic capital.This is the piece most desalination financing structures still need. Traditional infrastructure finance wants a de-risked, operating asset. Catalytic capital, which is patient, risk-tolerant, impact-oriented, is what lets innovative desalination technology companies to secure its first commercial deployment instead of being unable to move past the pilot stage. It typically comes from the water users themselves, or from public agencies willing to use their scale to absorb risk the market won’t.
- The community.NGOs, investors, public agencies and civil society are essential stakeholders in this catalytic community. They can accelerate the adoption and scaling of desalination and increase the probability of success.
What this looks like in practice
The freshwater sector already has working examples of catalytic communities as summarized below.
100 + Accelerator  built by AB InBev and now including Coca-Cola, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, and Danone, shows how multi-nationals can co-fund an innovation pipeline against shared sustainability priorities, with capital for pilots and a path to commercial contracts. There’s no reason a coalition of desalination-dependent industries such as data centers, semiconductor manufacturers, ports, coastal agriculture, couldn’t build an equivalent accelerator.
Water United , focused on the Colorado River Basin, offers a second model: a founding coalition (Microsoft, PepsiCo, Meta, water utilities, and technology partners) organized around a single goal, to fund technologies that reduce water use in agriculture and reduce non-revenue water in utilities. A desalination-focused catalytic community in  Southern California could organize around an equally significant shared target; reducing the energy intensity of new capacity by half within a decade for example.
Another catalytic community is Cascadia, a sustainable aviation fuel accelerator. The Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator (CSAA) aims to rapidly accelerate production, deployment, and adoption of sustainable aviation fuel across the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the United States. As a unique coalition of stakeholders representing the entire sustainable aviation fuel value chain, CSAA’s work will simultaneously support aviation’s global decarbonization objectives while building regional economic resilience for aviation in the PNW.
An emerging catalytic community is being built by Kreneon in accelerating investment in water assets. For background, the renewable energy transition was stalled for decades until the development of digital registries (like ERCOT in 2001) and standardized virtual power purchase agreements (vPPAs) in 2013.  Between 2015 and 2024 global renewable power generation surged from just 0.3 GW to over 64GW – with over 164GW in progress.  Kreneon is that same catalytic agent for water. It is the first financial market-enabling system for the water economy. By integrating a meter-to-ledger registry with a standardized virtual water purchase agreement (vWPA) contract, Kreneon unbundles the volumetric and environmental attributes of water from water production, just like wheat, soy beans, gold or electricity.  The registry verifies production directly at the meter, while the vWPA enables a cash settlement. This allows corporate off-takers to anchor long-term project debt and monetize localized additionality in water-stressed basins without physically routing a single pipe. By standardizing this system, Kreneon turns the water-positive outcomes of catalytic communities into a liquid, bankable asset that traditional project finance can underwrite and private capital can invest in.
Finally, Charco Bendito , a twelve-company beverage industry initiative restoring a Mexican micro-basin, is the reminder that catalytic communities don’t have to be large in geographic reach. A single water stressed coastal aquifer, with a handful of committed industrial water users and one strong technical operator, is enough to start.
Why this matters now
We are at a genuine inflection point for water. A recent WWF/GlobeScan survey of over 30,000 people across 31 countries found that companies and governments generally still don’t grasp how much water actually matters to them, or what happens when it isn’t there. That same research pointed toward the same conclusion: cross-sectoral, collective action in priority, at-risk catchments is what experts see as most critical to achieving impact at scale.
Desalination sits at an unusually clear intersection of that need and that opportunity. The technology is mature enough to de-risk. The corporate demand is real and growing, particularly from water-intensive industries facing watershed-level constraints they can’t solve through efficiency alone. What’s missing is the deliberate, commercially structured community to connect the two with capital patient enough to get proven innovation past its awkward middle stage and into the market at the pace scarcity now demands.
Collective action taught the water sector how to talk to each other. Catalytic communities are how we turn that conversation into deployed capacity. Desalination, more than almost any other water technology today, is ready for that shift. The only question is who builds the first community brave enough to prove it.
