Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Adam Bubis. I'm an engineering construction analyst here at Goldman Sachs, and I'm delighted to host today's panel on water and land efficiency. Rising temperatures, growing and aging global populations, and a heightened focus on overall resource security have all intensified a focus on water and land efficiency. We're increasingly seeing headlines in the press about problems related to too much or too little water and ensuring security of supply for key resources while minimizing environmental impacts. This panel is going to explore both leading corporates and investors that are addressing these challenges of meeting reliability needs while maximizing efficiency. We have with us today a range of experts. Susan Moisio, Global Water Market Director at Jacobs Solutions Inc. Jacobs is a global leader in water infrastructure. We have Matt DiSerio, Co-Founder and President of Water Asset Management, an investment firm focused on water, and Ara Erickson, Vice President of Corporate Sustainability at Weyerhaeuser, a major land and timber manager. Let's start with you, Susan. Jacobs Solutions Inc. is at the forefront of designing and implementing water infrastructure. Can you just outline where Jacobs plays in the water space? What's your core approach to helping customers? What do you see as the biggest demand drivers for this portion of your offering across each of the water verticals? Thank you. Pleasure to be here. At Jacobs, we look at water from a one-water standpoint. What we mean by that is that all water has value. The solutions that we've got to come back with have got to look at this complex and interconnected way that water is not only procured, but how the water cycle is in real life, if you will. From that standpoint, we also manage this from the complete asset lifecycle, from planning to design to construction and operations, and then back to asset management. Looking at it from that standpoint allows us to dive into providing complete solutions for our clients from also a digital standpoint. I think the importance of our digital offering is that because we are in the operations business for water and wastewater, we're actually able to show that the digital offerings that we are developing, that we're using them, and they're working for our clients and for us. The final thing I would say is that what is driving water for us is it's either too much water, such as we're hearing, you can't actually see anything outside the windows because of that. There's too much. We either have too much water from a climate change standpoint or too little water from also a climate change standpoint, such as a water scarcity in the western part of the U.S., or we have a water quality issue. I'm going to stop there and let you move on. Terrific. Let's move from the waters to the timbers. Weyerhaeuser manages vast timberlands. Ara, help us understand how do you integrate sustainable forestry practices and land stewardship into your business strategy to ensure water quality and also forest health? What are some of the KPIs you're using to measure this progress? What lessons have you learned from managing such extensive natural assets? Yeah, great question. Good morning, everybody. I think this is my third year being here, and you guys always do a great job giving us many questions at one time. I'm going to touch on just a couple of aspects of this. As one of the world's largest forest landowners and also manufacturers of wood products, forests and water have an inherent connection. Our trees cannot grow without water, and we cannot physically grow our asset or then sell our logs or create our wood products that go into important things like homes and buildings around the world without water. I like to joke, some people ask us, do you water your trees? How much water does it take to water your trees? I like to picture all of these little elves out watering every tree, but in reality, we rely on rainwater. Rainwater falls on our forests, and then our forests absorb that uptake of that water and create these beautiful things that we then love and also can use as valuable assets in the world. Water and forests are important. Mostly in forests, that's about water quality, and that's about how do we make certain that the water that is being filtered and used on our forest lands, falls on our forest lands, returns to the water cycle. As Susan mentioned, it's all connected, and that water is then clean for downstream uses like cities and New York City, for example. Not our forests, but New York City has a protected watershed upstream that provides filtered, delicious water. I hope you're all drinking it from the tap. I'm not right now. We think about water quality, and I'll get into later about how we sort of manage for that water quality in our forests. Some of those KPIs are things like, though, how big are our riparian buffers so that we can protect water quality in our forests? We have an assurance program around our forest management and the fiber we procure from others, other landowners around things like following best management practices around riparian areas. That's what we look to. Can we meet those expectations? Can we pass on that assurance to our customers? Can our investors understand that we are protecting water quality, protecting riparian habitats, and ensuring that the water that we are so fortunate hopefully falls at the right amount at the right time? We'll get into this a little bit later, so that we can continue to manage that asset far into the future. Terrific. Matt, let's bring you in from the investment perspective. Water Asset Management is obviously focused on the water, but can you talk about the scope of your investable universe across the supply chain? How has that focus shifted over the past few years in terms of where across water value chain or lifecycle you're focusing your attention? With water stocks among the most overweight in sustainability funds today, where do you see the most underappreciated investment opportunities? Our areas of focus are in global listed water-related equities and water resources in the Western United States. Those are the two areas of focus. We have two separate teams. One is a global listed equity team, and the other is our private equity team. On the listed equity side, despite your comment, we're actually seeing more value in listed in certain sectors of listed global water-related equities today. For example, in the U.S., water utility infrastructure is trading at multiples that are where they were like 15 years ago. They basically had almost doubled during the zero-bound rate period. Many of them have corrected significantly. There is a lot of value in water utility infrastructure. When you combine that with the fact that privatization of water utility infrastructure has been a long-term theme since we started focusing on water investing, it's getting realized today at a rate that we've never seen before. For example, there's about a half a dozen water utility infrastructure systems around the world that have historically been owned by governments where those governments recognize their inability to fund the substantial capital investments required, and they recognize the need for more efficient private industry-type operational expertise. What are they doing? They're listing those companies. The opportunity set, the universe is growing. In that particular sector, it's actually cheaper to express infrastructure through listed equities with daily liquidity than in private equity. As we all know, literally trillions of dollars have been drawn into locked-up private equity infrastructure funds. A lot of those folks don't have, their mandate doesn't include listed equities. It's a very underdeveloped and under kind of exploited universe. Just quickly on the land and water side, the private equity stuff that we do is focused on, we own about 70,000 acres currently of farmland only in the Southwest, very specific and selectively acquired farmland with senior water rights that has historically been used to flood irrigate low-value annual crops, primarily alfalfa, which has historically mostly been exported. What we do is we buy that land and we crop switch from very thirsty alfalfa to a desert crop that's drip irrigated. We're then able on farm to save about 80% of the water. We can sell or lease that water to the federal government who's looking for augmented supplies, cities, real estate developers, industry, energy generators, et cetera. When we're talking about land and water efficiency, that strategy, which we can talk about more, is really directly focused on that optimization. Super interesting. Let's shift gears here and talk about the actual economics of sustainable water and land management. Let's start with you, Ara. Let's discuss the economics of sustainable forestry. What are some of the strategies Weyerhaeuser deploys to manage its forests across regions? Can you highlight some of the practices put in place that are not required by federal or state regulations, but have a direct benefit on the portfolio and value chain? Are there any specific examples of in-the-money solutions which provide tangible benefits, whether it's reduced operational risk, improved biodiversity, or enhanced market value for sustainably sourced wood products? Great. I'll start with maybe, again, I always kind of go back to the basics. The basic thing that we can do to sort of enhance efficiency and manage is increase productivity in our forest lands. Since the 1960s or since the 1930s, Weyerhaeuser has been replanting forests. By the way, companies and agencies and organizations didn't do that really before 1930 or the early 1930s. Since the 1960s, we've been investing in what we call high-yield forestry. What we're looking at is how can we actually grow a larger tree quicker on our landscape. Sometimes we can only make a tree grow so fast. It's not like we can make a tree grow out of nothing. With that high-yield forestry, we've been able to increase the amount of literal wood that we can put on a tree in a shorter amount of time in a smaller acreage. I kind of go back to some of the times where we've stopped harvesting as much from national forests or public forests in the U.S. The private sector has really been able to continue or maintain the amount of fiber available into the market by increasing our productivity. Weyerhaeuser has been at the forefront of that. I actually think that is the first thing that we do as forest landowners is have high productivity lands. We focus our portfolio in those lands that can grow the trees the best. We adapt to what's happening in the climate related to will there still be water falling on those trees, what's the growing season, and then what can we do for very targeted application of things like fertilizer to allow for those trees to grow faster. What kind of thinning operations can we do? That's a really basic thing that is not required regulatorily or compliance, but is actually what improves our asset. We have many more examples of things that we're doing where we measure for and enhance biodiversity. I'm going to go back to that certification program again, because it is our assurance that we are improving and enhancing biodiversity, protecting water quality, working with communities, adapting to climate change. All of that is wrapped into both our forest management, and then some of that is wrapped into our wood fiber procurement. That's what I would look to as sort of the evidence of where we are doing those things, because it's impossible to sort of quantify at anything that's really digestible at the scale we operate. We have 10 million acres in the U.S. of highly productive forest land, and we manage 14 million acres in Canada. It is huge. What I look to is, where do we then prove that we are doing all these things that we're being asked to do to maximize efficiency, whether it's from water to the soil microbes? That's going to show up in our certification and in our wood procurement programs. Great. Susan, from a project perspective, what are the switching and investment costs for a customer to transition from traditional water infrastructure to more resilient and efficient engineered solutions? What are the premiums for innovative digital water technologies or integrated urban water planning? What are the long-term benefits? Which type of customers and geographies are you seeing a more willingness to invest to mitigate physical risk? Starting from the standpoint of that was a long question, my friend. I'm just going to protest that right now. Long question. I have to go back and think of the beginning of what you asked me, but kind of setting the stage for what we've got. When we're looking at our clients who are looking to be more sustainable, and I'm going to use an example, one here in New York, Onondaga County. Onondaga County has concerns and has consent decrees about their combined sewer overflows. There's too much water, and the water quality is poor. Those are the issues that they are managing right now. They can go one of two directions. They can build big gray infrastructure, tunnels, storage tanks, or they can look at this as a system. That ties back into what Ara is doing. This is water as a system. It is a watershed. If we manage it as a watershed, if we understand it as a watershed, if we understand that it is not merely the municipal, but it is also the natural, and it also is the people side of things, then we can manage this from a way that is sustainable. I got to your first question. Now, what are the switching costs? You want to be more sustainable, and you want to invest in this. What does that take? First of all, you have to understand what you have and what the opportunities are to make that happen. In Onondaga County, that meant looking at and being willing to invest in green infrastructure, which makes it a longer-term proposition. I just got back two weeks ago from London where we just are commissioning the Thames Tideway Tunnel. It's a big CSO tunnel. I'm on what's called the Design Suitability Oversight Group for them, making sure that when we commission it, that it works in the way it was intended. That's a decision. A decision was made. It is a good decision. It's a water quality-based decision. When you're wanting to be more sustainable, you have to think longer-term and bigger area, a bigger and broader look at this. Was that your second one? You got it. You're on it. The last on it. The last one is just which customers are you seeing are trying to focus on sustainability? Which geographies? Are there any shifts? All of my customers care about sustainability, and some of them can embrace it more fully than others. I'm going to use Singapore PUB as an example of one that has embraced it for many, many years and had developed a very one-water approach of how they don't have enough water. Not having enough water, they had to look at this from a water security standpoint. That's an example of a government. We're also looking, as AI data centers become more common, there's a big water play there. That's not our typical customer; that's a more industrial customer. All of our customers. Thank you. Super. Matt, from an investment perspective, how do you quantify the financial returns and risk associated with investing in water efficiency and reliability projects? What metrics are you using to assess long-term value creation from these investments? When you think about factors like regulatory certainty, technological innovation, public perception, how do those factors play a role in your valuation and investment process? Yeah, on our private equity water resource development strategy, we basically underwrite to kind of basically 3 or 4x MOIC unlevered. What's very appealing about the strategy is that the return profile is extremely asymmetrical, meaning that the risk of capital loss is minimal. The reason for that is because we buy these assets at their agricultural value. There's a substantial arbitrage between a molecule that is regulated or allowed to only be used for agricultural consumption, and then having that regulatory rules also allow for municipal and industrial consumption of that molecule. Achieving that arbitrage is not easy. It takes a lot of work, and it takes time. You have to have the right asset when you select it, when you buy. If, in fact, we don't meet our underwriting objective, then we own a great farm, pretty much usually unlevered. The underlying appreciation of agriculture in the U.S. has been roughly 4%, 5%, 6% per year on a rolling five-year average for 50 years. We've been doing this for 15 years. We've done it like 63 times or something. Knock on wood, we don't have any assets that are worth less than what we bought. We closed recently on a sale of water just in July where we met our established underwriting targets. One of the things that's super interesting is that these programs that we've been, these on-farm water conservation programs that we've initiated, we're currently saving around 34 billion gallons of water a year, which is a massive amount of water. The outline that we've got for the next few years is to double that again. The crop switch that we're engaged with also has an additional benefit in that our partner, for every acre they plant with us, they don't cut down 20 acres of forest. It's a replacement crop. If you think about 50,000 acres, that's a million acres of forest that don't get cut. That has a carbon sequestration component, biodiversity, and a whole bunch of other virtuously cyclical things. The strategy generates great returns. It does it in a very low-risk fashion, and it does it with a lot of impact. Great. Let's switch gears here. Now that we have a better grasp on that economic perspective, let's explore some of the technologies that are being used to deliver the solutions. Ara, let's start with you. How is Weyerhaeuser leveraging technology to monitor precipitation and cultivate seedlings that can withstand the changing temperature and climates? Are there direct impacts to the harvest cycle, and how quickly can you grow your resources to provide financial returns? Yeah, great question. Much shorter, thank you. I think many of us are here this week for New York Climate Week. One of the real impacts that we are seeing is in some places, there's a lot of water falling in much heavier amounts. In some places, we're seeing places where we aren't getting water falling when we're expecting it. We have the benefit of having land all across the United States and managing land in Canada. In 125 years of analytics and information, obviously, the analytics looked a little different 125 years ago, but analytics and information about our growing conditions of our forest. That means in some areas, we have longer growing cycles. Like in the Southeast, it's raining a little bit more, and it's very warm temperatures, and so forests actually are responding pretty positively to that. We have areas that are quite wet sometimes for harvesting, and we may need to adapt when we are harvesting in order to make certain we can maximize getting those trees out and then replanted in the right time frame. In the West Coast, where it's a little bit warmer and a little bit drier in some places, and potentially a shorter growing season because summer is extended in some places, we are looking at how and deploying when we plant our seedlings potentially at different times of year. We may be planted in the spring, and we may need to look a little earlier. Those are all things that we have the ability to adapt to. We grow our own seedlings, and we also collect our own seeds then. We can then be looking at and doing what we call tree improvement, not genetic modification, but traditional breeding, to be pulling seeds potentially from maybe lower latitude areas, planting them in higher latitude areas so that they can be growing in these drier conditions. As a large company, we have the ability to do that. We also then produce seedlings for others to purchase so that those can be adapted in certain places. I think that's the base technology. It's like, how do we understand where growing conditions are best suited for the types of seedlings we are growing? That is our biggest technology that we have right now. I'll just touch on two other examples of where we're doing applied research with universities. The forest sector has a long history of working in co-ops and with universities to help support how we manage our forests, both public and private, across the United States. We are working with the university to deploy acoustic monitoring for things like pests so you can actually hear them. If those are issues on our lands or other lands, those are things that are happening in a changing climate. Forests have also been adapting for millennia. They will continue to adapt. It is really our job as a steward of those forests and of the asset right now to best adapt to what is happening right in front of us and project out in the future. I will just end on, we plant a tree today. It takes us many decades before we can reap the return on that. We have to do everything possible to make certain we are reducing the cost and then the survivability of that tree, of that seedling. We get capital, we deploy that capital, and it is in our interest and everyone who invests in us' interest to make certain that survives. We have a full, it is very tied to our financial performance as a company. It is also tied to the stewardship of the resource that we have. That is just one example of sort of very small scale, but all the way up to the top line of our company. Susan, what technology levers, such as specific engineering technologies and digital water solutions, does Jacobs deploy? Where are you seeing the most outsized impact on water efficiency and resilience? What key challenges and opportunities do you see in reducing land and energy footprint of water treatment facilities? OK, next time you invite me, I'm going to have Nora sit out there with the questions when they pop up so I can remember them. OK, thank you. From a technical standpoint, and technical meaning whether it's a digital technology or a process technology, we invest and develop both of those. I'm going to give you examples from a watershed standpoint that goes into how we manage and operate a treatment plant more efficiently. We've developed a software called Replica many, many years ago. Replica is about looking at that complete watershed approach of where all of the water, it's a water balance piece of that. You look at it and say, where does Ara need the water? Where does New York City need the water? How are we managing this water balance? We move with that digital product into how do we do planning? How do we then operate this system more fully? We've developed what we call Intelligent O&M. By the way, as a company, when we name things, everybody gets together and names. Some of our names are not very cool, and some of them are dragonfly. We go with the whole balance of that. Being able to test how you're going to manage a treatment plant or a water plant so that you can reduce the chemical and the power cost, that's what we've been focusing on. We've been able to test that in the places where we're operating these plants. The tough thing about this is that, truth and lending, if you will, I'm a civil engineer. Civil engineers, it's actually kind of easy for us to embrace tech. We live and die by it. Operators of treatment plants, not so. They are a little skeptical because they're on the line from a requirement standpoint. They have to do this well. Being able to show that we can make this work and that our operators will embrace it gives us a case study that we can take, and we can use that in other places where we're not operating it. That's where we've seen the greatest benefit. We've seen the greatest being able to adopt it and show where we could take this elsewhere and do this around the entire world. Last piece of an example is in Denmark. VCS Denmark is a long-term client of ours, a great sustainability client. I love the way that they think. We have worked with them to have an energy-positive wastewater treatment plant, which means that not only are we more efficient in how we're managing that plant with them, but they're giving back to the community. Being able to develop that with them, test it, pilot it, and then take it somewhere else, that's where we see this going. Matt, what are some of the most exciting technologies today that you're seeing? What do you think has the greatest potential for driving water savings and resiliency at either municipal, corporate, or household level? I will answer that question in two pieces. One is that the water industry, as Susan Moisio referenced, has been adopting and implementing technology to create efficiency pretty aggressively for the last, I'd say, 10 years, give or take. It's stuff like miniaturization of water quality sensors, which enable 24/7 telemetry so that you can monitor water quality, not just when you dip a little bottle in a water system to measure and then take it to a lab, but it's nonstop water quality analysis. The whole Internet of Things, i.e., linking equipment together so that you can monitor it in real time. Obviously, there's all predictive analytics around both leak detection and pump efficiency, for example. Companies now can predict before a pump is going to fail. They can anticipate that and not have a systems outage. There is lots and lots of technology that is being implemented to create efficiency and transparency. We get the question all the time, is there a silver bullet technology that's going to solve water? The answer to that, in our opinion, is no. The silver bullet for solving water quality and water supply reliability is actually regulatory. It's having the right regulatory framework within a service territory that requires ultimately full-cost pricing, which enables the economic flywheel, which is the foundation of this industry, to generate ultimately the cash to support capital investment, capital investment maintenance, operational management, and then, as importantly, servicing debt and generating a return on equity. Where you see regulatory frameworks like that, and I don't care whether it's in California or Manila, that's where you get very reliable 24/7 water because it's attracting all the capital that's needed. That's where technology gets implemented. The second part of my answer is that solar renewables, in particular solar, and all of the data center insanity going on right now needs land. We are experiencing a very kind of value-added opportunity on the land that we own and have underwritten, which was not really part of the original underwriting. When we sell water, we often, and we have leased significant amounts of our land to solar developers. We are getting an incremental value from multi-decade-long leases from solar developers. Some of the land we own, and again, we knew we had access to some of this infrastructure, but it wasn't the reason we bought the land. You know, we'll have natural gas pipelines, for example, on the land. It'll have close proximity to large fiber trunks. Right now, everybody's looking for a multi-gigawatt scale data center development. The grid, as we're going to hear more today, is going to be very hard for the established grid to provide that. We're going to see, I believe, we believe, an explosion of behind-the-meter power development. In order for that to happen, you need land, you need water, and you need access to either solar and/or natural gas. The number of pipelines that have that kind of multi-gigawatt gas deliverability, available capacity with a good gas source at the end, there just aren't that many of those. If you've got one, it's a very valuable, that combination of assets where there's also a solar coefficient, that can become a very valuable asset. Two answers to that with regards to technology. We've covered a lot. Let's wrap up here by focusing on what's next for this theme. Matt, let's stick with you. What do you think is a water land management technology or topic today that's underappreciated? What do you anticipate changing stakeholder opinions to catalyze greater attention and action for it? We started 20 years ago on the core belief that water is and will become, and it is now really the defining resource of this century. I think the thing most people don't realize is that water is an investable asset class. Number two, most people, and I say most people, most sophisticated allocators still don't understand that water has been an outstanding place to invest. Water investing has outperformed many widely held asset classes for the last 20 years. Most people don't know that, whether it's the S&P or the MSCI All-World, credit, renewables, emerging markets, commodities. If you asked most people in this room, they probably would not have said that that was the case. I think it's important for people to understand that water is investable. The returns outperform many asset classes. The reason that's important is because, as someone mentioned in an earlier panel, climate change is bad because of the intensification of the drought and flood. The whole community has been focused exclusively on mitigation and mitigation strategies for the last 10 or 15 years. We need balance with adaptation, not only in mind share, but within capital allocation. Adaptation is water. There are water-related companies and water-related assets and water-related solutions to address the intensification of drought and flood. Susan, given the growing global focus on water footprint of agriculture, how is Jacobs extending its expertise in water resource management to improve efficiency on agricultural land? Are you exploring new digital solutions to address this? We are. We've had a focus as we've gone through our recent strategy refresh on water, energy, and food nexus. How do we look at this not only from inside the fence, from a plant standpoint, but how do we look at this for the entire watershed? That brings in your ag piece of this. From that standpoint, I think we've always done that, but we've done it in a way that was more siloed. As we go forward, we're going to put more focus on not only what are we doing from what we call pure play water, but how are we impacting across all of our end markets? How are we playing? I'm really excited to be on this panel and hearing what you guys have going on because I see that's the play to be in. It's not only are we the best at designing and implementing treatment works, but are we understanding how we could play in an ag space? How can we play in an AI data center space? How can we look across water? Great. Ara, as the largest private timberlands owner, how is Weyerhaeuser benefiting? Should the value of carbon increase over time? Looking forward, how do you see Weyerhaeuser playing a role in climate solutions at scale? How's that tying to land efficiency? Great. I hope you hear some themes, and I'm going to build on both what Susan and Matthew said as a wrap-up here. Obviously, forests are an incredible sink of carbon, and that's one of the really important, I'm going to call it mitigation measures, is that we need to maintain those carbon sinks first and foremost. To maintain those carbon sinks, especially in forests like ours, it means we need to have demand for what we do. We need to have investment for what we do as a forestry company that we can create and sell wood products. I think, Susan, if we could build those data centers out of wood and manage the water there, we get a double win because that provides revenue back to companies like ours to maintain those forests. Before we think about anything else in climate change right now, it's about maintaining those carbon sinks today. That's really important. We layer on additional revenue opportunities onto those forest lands because that's what we're, it's our responsibility as a company to do that. We believe that the voluntary carbon market, at least in the U.S., without a compliance market, the voluntary carbon market is the most readily available, it's not a silver bullet, but most readily available technology today to invest in natural climate solutions for climate mitigation. That is by far the quickest and least expensive thing we can do. We are layering on those forest carbon projects onto our already existing working forests. We're balancing that, still producing wood products. That allows us to keep our forests. It allows us to increase the carbon stocks on our forests. We have to prove additionality in that so we aren't just getting paid for a credit for something we're already doing. We're physically changing practices on those lands. That allows us to add value by bringing in carbon credits, maintain our forests as forests, which again, underlying the importance of those forest carbon sinks today, and tying it to water. The water that falls on those forests is filtered, captured, and filtered. I'm a forestry student. I'm just going to end with this really simple analogy that I learned about water. If you picture the trees with all these little tiny teacups on them, when water falls, those teacups actually hold on to the water. Then they go into the tree eventually, and they filter down. If there are no teacups out there, then all that water is going to quickly, very quickly, end up into us needing to manage them at the end source through massive investments, which I'm really glad to know there are companies doing that. We rely on some of those in our wood product manufacturing sites, and we rely on them as people who live in urban areas in order to clean that water. If we go back to just letting those teacups be there, those forests can actually hold on to and retain so much water. I think it's all kind of, it's all cyclical. The water cycle is cyclical. The carbon cycle is cyclical. It's really up to us to be putting our resources to those places where we know it can be both mitigating climate change and maintaining our water systems. Terrific. We're going to end with one last question for each of you, the same question. We're just looking for one or two-word answer here. In a year, do you believe proactive investment towards water and land efficiency solutions will be modestly higher, meaningfully higher, flat, modestly lower, or meaningfully lower than today? We can start with you, Susan, and just go down the line. Meaningfully higher. I agree, meaningfully higher. I'm going to say absolutely, and I sure hope so. Terrific. Susan, Matt, Ara, thank you so much for joining us.