The root
Why water, food and energy.
Systemic crises, their root and the logic of intervention: the demonstration of what the front page claims.
12 min de lectura
1 · The adjective
Systemic crises: what it means.
The world is going through a phase of systemic crises. The adjective does not point to a crisis of the system as a whole, but to a property of the ongoing crises: they are connected by cause-and-effect relationships running in several directions, so that each feeds the others. In systems-analysis terms, they are linked by feedback loops: the worsening of one variable worsens the others, and these come back on the first.
A recent example illustrates it. The price of energy rises. Fertilisers are made from natural gas, with energy-intensive processes, so their price rises. Then food prices rise. And from there grow food insecurity and the economic and political instability of importing countries. It is the chain observed in 2022 and again in 2026: a new energy crisis, which the IEA defines as the second worldwide in five years, is passing through to fertiliser and food prices, as the projections of the SOFI 2026 report record. The chain also works in reverse: a drought reduces harvests, and it also reduces hydroelectric production and the cooling of thermal power plants, that is, the supply of energy.
The practical consequence is that the crises cannot be tackled one at a time as if they were independent. One must understand the structure of the relationships: which variables move the others and which merely follow them.
2 · The root
Not all on the same level.
Among the ongoing crises, three occupy a position different from the rest: water, food and energy. Water, food and energy are the physical preconditions of life and of every productive activity; they are magnitudes measurable in cubic metres, calories and kilowatt hours; and they are linked to one another by quantified relationships.
- Agriculture absorbs about 70% of the world's freshwater withdrawals (FAO, AQUASTAT). Without water, no food is produced.
- Food systems consume about 30% of the world's final energy, across production, processing, transport and storage (FAO, 2011). Without energy, food is neither produced nor distributed.
- The water sector absorbs about 4% of the world's electricity consumption, across abstraction, treatment, distribution and purification; the energy sector absorbs about 10% of the world's freshwater withdrawals, mostly for cooling power plants (IEA, 2016). Without energy, water is neither obtained nor distributed; without water, less energy is produced.
These relationships have been studied for more than a decade under the name of the water-energy-food nexus (Hoff, 2011, for the Bonn Nexus Conference; FAO, 2014). The relevant point is that the nexus constitutes the deepest level of the system: the three magnitudes condition one another and, together, condition everything else.
The current size of the problem:
- 2.1 billion people lack safely managed drinking water (WHO/UNICEF JMP, 2025, 2024 data); about half of the world's population experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year (IPCC, 2022).
- 645 million people suffered hunger in 2025 and 2.1 billion experienced moderate or severe food insecurity; a healthy diet is out of reach for about 2.7 billion people (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, SOFI 2026).
- 655 million people have no access to electricity and about 2 billion cook with polluting fuels and technologies (IEA, IRENA, UN DESA, World Bank and WHO, Tracking SDG 7, 2026, 2024 data).
Where these three magnitudes are missing, the other crises worsen. Section 4 shows how.
3 · The climate
The cross-cutting variable.
The climate crisis is linked to the three roots in both directions.
On the side of the causes, two figures. The energy sector generates around three quarters of global greenhouse-gas emissions; agriculture, forests and land use, around a fifth (Climate Watch, WRI, compiled by Our World in Data). And if the whole food chain is counted, from production to disposal, food systems account for around a third of emissions (Crippa et al., 2021). The climate changes above all because of how we produce energy and food.
On the effects side, warming alters the water cycle: more frequent and intense droughts and floods, and lower agricultural yields in many regions. The IPCC estimates that between 3.3 and 3.6 billion people live in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change (IPCC, 2022). Climate hits water and food first of all.
It follows that the climate is not a fourth front to be opened separately. Its causes are reduced by acting on energy and food (mitigation); its effects are contained by acting on water and food (adaptation). The three roots are, at the same time, the levers of the climate and the first victims of the climate.
The two levers do not act at the same pace. Mitigation reduces the causes, but its effect arrives with decades of inertia: even in the fastest scenarios, the effects already under way will keep intensifying over the coming decades (IPCC, 2022). Countering those effects, by giving back water, food and energy where they are missing, produces results from day one. That is why the technologies Volcano prioritises do not limit themselves to mitigating the change: they seek to counter its effects as soon as possible.
4 · Downstream
The dependent crises.
The other crises sit downstream of the three roots. Not in the sense that they have only that cause, but in the sense that their evolution depends on the state of water, food and energy, and that no intervention on them holds if that state does not change.
Economic crises. Energy and food prices are the most volatile part of inflation, and the first to reach the budgets of households and importing countries. In March 2022 the FAO food price index hit its all-time high. In 2026 the SOFI report again points to food inflation driven by energy and fertilisers (SOFI 2026), coinciding with the energy crisis described by the IEA (World Energy Investment 2026).
Health crises. Inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene are associated with about 1.4 million deaths a year (WHO, 2023, with 2019 data). Household air pollution from solid fuels used for cooking, with about 3.2 million (WHO). And 150 million children under five are stunted by malnutrition (SOFI 2026). These are direct consequences of water, energy and food insecurity.
Migration crises. The World Bank estimates up to 216 million internal climate migrants by 2050 in six regions of the world, with water scarcity, falling agricultural yields and sea-level rise among the main drivers (World Bank, Groundswell, 2021).
Political crises. Food price spikes are statistically associated with waves of social unrest (Lagi, Bertrand and Bar-Yam, 2011); the Pacific Institute has documented for decades the conflicts in which water is a cause, an instrument or a target (Water Conflict Chronology).
Each of these crises can be addressed directly: price subsidies, emergency food aid, treatment of waterborne diseases, border policies. They are necessary interventions in an emergency, but they act on the effect: as long as the upstream cause remains, the effect returns and the intervention has to be repeated.
5 · The lever
Independent and dependent variables: where it pays to intervene.
We call independent variables the magnitudes that can be acted on directly, with technology, infrastructure and organisation, and dependent variables those that move as a consequence. The definition is operational, not statistical: in a system with feedback no variable is independent in the strict sense, and water, food and energy are in turn affected by climate, demography and conflicts. What sets them apart is that concrete levers exist to change them: desalination and water reuse, precision irrigation, agronomy and storage, renewable generation, grids, storage and efficiency. For an economic, health or migration crisis there is no equally direct lever: one acts on its determinants, or on its symptoms.
Systems theory confirms this hierarchy. Donella Meadows ranked the leverage points of a system from least to most effective, placing at the bottom interventions on parameters and surface flows and at the top those on the structure that generates behaviours (Meadows, 1999). John Sterman described policy resistance: interventions on symptoms are absorbed by the system, which rebuilds the problem by another route (Sterman, 2000). In engineering practice the same principle is called root cause analysis.
Intervening on the independent variables has a second advantage: a single solution improves several dependent variables at the same time. Safe water reduces disease, the hours lost collecting it, school absenteeism and health spending; the WHO estimated an economic return of about 4 dollars for every dollar invested in water and sanitation (Hutton, 2012). Intervening on the dependent variables, by contrast, means scattering time and resources on effects that return as long as the cause remains.
6 · The proportion
Size of the problem, impact and return.
The three root crises are also the biggest and most urgent problems of our time. Bigger by the number of people involved: billions, as the data in section 2 show. More urgent because their consequences accumulate through the dependent crises and because the climate accelerates their dynamics. And they demand new solutions, because the existing ones have not closed the gap: at the current pace, the sustainable development goals on water, hunger and energy will not be met in 2030 (JMP 2025; SOFI 2026; Tracking SDG 7, 2026).
The bigger the problem solved, the greater the impact and the financial return. Impact grows with the number of people whose condition changes. Financial return grows because the size of the problem sets the ceiling of the reachable market. In energy alone, global investment is estimated at 3.4 trillion dollars for 2026, of which 2.2 in clean technologies (IEA, World Energy Investment 2026). And spending on water and food concerns every person and every company on the planet.
This relationship must be read precisely. It holds for the upper bound: the size of the problem defines the total market, not the share a single company wins, and it does not remove technological, regulatory and execution risk, which in big problems is often higher. That is why the choice to intervene at the root demands a way of innovating different from the ordinary one, able to reduce risk without reducing the size of the problem. That is the field in which Volcano operates.
7 · The status of each claim
Evidence, hypotheses and assumptions.
| Claim | State | Basis or way of validating |
|---|---|---|
| The ongoing crises are interdependent and reinforce one another | Consolidated evidence | Literature on the water-energy-food nexus; price transmission from energy to fertilisers and food documented in 2022 and in 2026 |
| Water, food and energy are linked to one another by quantified relationships | Consolidated evidence | FAO AQUASTAT; FAO 2011; IEA 2016 |
| The climate is caused largely by energy and food and strikes water and food first of all | Consolidated evidence | Climate Watch; Crippa et al. 2021; IPCC AR6 WGII |
| Economic, health, migration and political crises depend on the state of the three roots | Evidence for the individual channels; working hypothesis for the overall hierarchy | The relationships in section 4 are documented; the idea that all the other crises are dependent is a simplification useful for positioning, not a proof |
| The three roots are the variables that can be acted on directly | Working hypothesis (operational definition) | Existence of technological and infrastructure levers; to be verified project by project with the maturity of the technologies (TRL scale) |
| Intervening at the root is more effective than intervening on symptoms | Evidence in systems theory; to be validated for each project | Meadows 1999; Sterman 2000; return on investment in water and sanitation (Hutton 2012); for each startup, measure the effect on the dependent variables with indicators defined in advance |
| Countering the effects produces results sooner than mitigation | Evidence for climate inertia; strategic decision for the priority | IPCC AR6 (warming committed over the coming decades); immediate return of adaptation interventions (Hutton 2012) |
| Bigger problem, greater impact and return | Working hypothesis valid for the upper bound | Size of the total market (TAM); to be validated with SAM and SOM and with the risk analysis of each startup |
8 · The sources
References.
Sources with a link were verified on the publication date of this page.
- FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO (2026). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026. fao.org
- WHO and UNICEF, Joint Monitoring Programme (2025). Progress on household drinking water, sanitation and hygiene 2000-2024: special focus on inequalities. data.unicef.org
- IEA, IRENA, UN DESA, World Bank and WHO (2026). Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report 2026. seforall.org
- IEA (2026). World Energy Investment 2026. iea.org
- IPCC (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Working Group II, Sixth Assessment Report.
- Crippa, M. et al. (2021). Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions. Nature Food, 2, 198-209.
- Climate Watch (World Resources Institute), sector emissions data, compiled by Our World in Data.
- FAO (2011). Energy-Smart Food for People and Climate. · FAO (2014). The Water-Energy-Food Nexus. · FAO, AQUASTAT.
- IEA (2016). Water-Energy Nexus, World Energy Outlook special report.
- Hoff, H. (2011). Understanding the Nexus. Stockholm Environment Institute.
- WHO (2023). Burden of disease attributable to unsafe drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene: 2019 update. · WHO, household air pollution.
- Hutton, G. (2012). Global costs and benefits of drinking-water supply and sanitation interventions. WHO.
- World Bank (2021). Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration.
- Lagi, M., Bertrand, K. Z., Bar-Yam, Y. (2011). The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East. NECSI.
- Pacific Institute, Water Conflict Chronology.
- Meadows, D. H. (1999). Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. · Sterman, J. D. (2000). Business Dynamics. McGraw-Hill.
From the root to the method
John F. Kennedy, 1962