James Rees

James Rees did not grow up planning a career in water, and he is the first to say so. On the (don't) Waste Water podcast he repeats a line he heard from a CEO at the same event, that ten years ago he was not in water either, and admits that is basically his own story too. His background is management consulting and investment banking, with roles at PwC, Greenhill and Credit Suisse back in Australia, and somewhere in his banking days he started leaning toward what was then called green infrastructure and is now climate tech. The reason it stuck is more personal than professional, because James Rees was born in Australia, which is one of the most water-scarce countries on earth, and he still remembers showering with a bucket as a kid so the family could pour that water on the garden afterwards.

James Rees is now the Chief Impact Officer at Botanical Water Technologies, and the idea behind the company is one of those things that sounds obvious only after someone points it out. When a processing plant turns tomatoes into ketchup or sugar cane into sugar, it boils the crop down, and because a tomato is roughly 90% water, a huge amount of clean water evaporates off and is usually just discharged. Botanical Water captures that evaporative condensate and filters it back up to drinking-water grade, so a single harvesting unit can produce up to 5,000 gallons an hour, which is close to half a million litres a day. That recovered water can be reinjected into a depleted aquifer, sold as a sustainable source, or trucked to a community that does not have safe water, which is the part Rees gets most animated about.

James Rees frames water as a fundamentally different problem from carbon, and it is a useful way to think about it. Carbon is global, so a tonne saved anywhere counts everywhere, but water is regional, and in his words you have to solve it county by county, because access, quality, contamination and ageing pipes all look different from one place to the next. That regional view is also why he keeps coming back to water technology as the thing that actually moves the needle, since the sector cannot keep doing what it has always done and expect a better result when climate events that used to be called once-in-a-thousand-years are now just the new normal.

James Rees spends a lot of his time on the money side of that problem, which is really what the company calls impact. Alongside the harvesting hardware, Botanical Water built the Botanical Water Exchange, a blockchain platform developed with Fujitsu that lets processors, beverage brands and utilities trade the recovered water or its impact credits, so a company can hit an ESG target by funding real water for a community that needs it. Before joining full time, Rees spent years as the advisor in the room helping mid-market water and climate-tech companies position themselves and raise capital, and he is blunt that there is a genuine knowledge gap on the investor side about what water even is as a market, which slows the money down. He has carried that same advocacy into op-eds for the World Economic Forum and a seat on the United Nations Water innovation task force.

“I was born in Australia. Australia is a very water-scarce country, and I always remember when I was growing up, whenever we had a shower, we had to shower with a bucket to catch the water and use that bucket of water to then water the plants in the garden.”

He is, in short, a banker who found a cause: someone fluent enough in cap tables to make the case for water to investors, and stubborn enough about access to clean water to call it a human right and mean it.