Christopher Gasson

Christopher Gasson did not come at water from water. He read politics and economics at the University of Oxford, drifted into journalism on a publishing-trade title, and from there into a boutique investment bank that bought and sold media businesses, even writing a book on how to value them. So when a tiny magazine for the international private-water market came up for sale, he saw it the way a media banker sees an asset, not the way an engineer sees a cause. He bought it in 2002 for GBP 17,000, and it had 162 subscribers. And then, by his own admission, he lost his money on it almost immediately, because the part of the industry it covered was, in his words, "falling like a stone."

Christopher Gasson reached his turning point that August, when the subscriptions kept dropping and he had to choose between walking away and going all in. He chose to "roll up my sleeves and do it full-time and find out about water," which he calls the best decision he ever made. The unlock came at the International Desalination Association conference in the Bahamas, where he noticed that desalination, unlike the collapsing private-water market, was genuinely international, full of private finance and high technology and contractors working everywhere at once. He went home, launched a desalination project tracker, mailed it to the thousand-odd people who had been at that conference, and got a hundred subscribers more or less overnight. That was the model: follow the money, follow the technology, and build the data nobody else was bothering to collect.

Christopher Gasson turned that one insight into the spine of the whole business. He used the desalination report to buy a database of plants (which became DesalData), used that to buy Water Desalination Report, and kept compounding outward into water reuse, wastewater, sludge, digital, and now climate. His framing is blunt: there are only two things that are genuinely international in water, money and technology, and "if you're going to run a magazine called Global Water Intelligence, it's global water stupidity not to focus on those things." That line is so much his worldview that it ended up in the title of his (don’t) Waste Water episode.

Christopher Gasson's central argument is the one most of the sector flinches from. He points out that water is brutally capital-intensive, that for every dollar of revenue you need seven or eight dollars of infrastructure invested, and that most organisations bringing the industry together "are afraid to talk about money," which to him is the main reason water doesn't work. The fix, in his telling, starts with language: stop calling people stakeholders and start treating them as customers, because if water is only ever something the rich world is supposed to fund for everyone else, it stays broken and disempowering. We need, he says, to believe that water is worth paying for. It is a provocative position, and he knows it, which is rather the point of a publication with thousands of subscribers it can afford to annoy.

“Water is immensely capital intensive. For $1 of revenue, you need $7 or $8 of infrastructure invested. And if you don't talk about how you're going to attract that $7 or $8 of infrastructure investment, you might as well get out of the water industry right now.”

Christopher Gasson now sits at the centre of the water world he once knew nothing about, running the Global Water Summit and the Global Water Awards where the industry's money and technology meet once a year, and he still tells the story the same way: he has seen the oak tree grow from the acorn, and he thinks the ship is next.