Water, risk and the economy: when sensible decisions add up to disaster

We rely on water for pretty much everything: growing food, manufacturing goods, building cities and sustaining everyday life. But what happens when the systems we've built around it start to reach their limits? Felicia Jackson talks to economist Dr Robert Johnston, director of the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University, about why he sees today's water challenge as a systems failure — and how individually sensible decisions can combine into what he calls a catastrophic harmony. We ...