Erwan Barillot is the CEO of a foresight company and author of articles, plays and books, including the speculative novel Moi, Omega (Bouquins, 2022). After serving public institutions and tech companies, he has created his own foresight company, proposing both report, event or practical team training for organizations. As an author, he is twice awarded by the Académie française.
What if a novel could prepare us for a crisis before it happens? In “H2O 2047: The Water War” (EPFL Press), Erwan Barillot follows Léa, a Swiss engineer, from Dubai to Davos as she races to secure water in a world of heatwaves, rationing and border disputes. The book is more than a thriller. It grew out of Deftech, a Swiss Federal program, and was nourished by hydrologists, engineers and military experts.
“H2O 2047: The Water War” is free to read online. Behind the plot lies a method, the “creative foresight”, which makes technological, economic, social and geopolitical ruptures tangible twenty years ahead. Zoom on this unique science-fiction novel.
H2O 2047 opens in April of the year 2047 in Dubai, where Léa, a Swiss engineer, is testing a new kind of desalination plant. She is thirty-seven, brilliant, and terrified of fire since her father died in a blaze when she was a teenager. A few days later she lands in Geneva, where her husband Nathan, her teenage son Luca, who dreams of becoming a firefighter, and their gene-edited dog are waiting. The reunion is short. Back home in Sion, in the Valais, a virulent bacterium turns up in alpine lakes, which Léa suspects was released by melting permafrost. Luca falls ill. Léa, who wanted only a moment of peace, takes over the coordination of RESINT, the volunteer network at the heart of Blue Corps, a unit tasked with securing water as critical infrastructure.
From then on, she is in charge of finding a new solution to each new problem that Switzerland has to face. The Rhine falls so low that barges cannot carry full cargoes, choking the supply of raw materials. Water thieves tap the network. A spiritual movement, the Penitents, preaches that humankind has “exhausted its sap”, and Léa’s own mother is among them. France accuses Switzerland of polluting the Rhône and uses the threat of lawsuits to push a UN resolution that redraws borders. After a poisoning attack on a water source in Austria, suspicion and xenophobia spread across Europe. In Bern, at 45 degrees, crowds march behind the slogan “Water for all, now!” While a canton declares its own water off limits to the rest of the country. Léa, engineer, team leader and mother, has no superpowers. She has tools, allies and doubts, and she must make choices where no option is clean. Her answers are as inventive as they are ambivalent. Each one saves something and costs something else. The seventy short chapters, each dated and located, build toward the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2048, where a conference on water as a “common good of humanity” opens the programme.
Why 2047? Twenty years is neither too far nor too near. It is far enough for technologies, climate trends and political tensions to mature, and close enough for readers to recognise themselves, their cities and their institutions. It is also the horizon of infrastructure: the dams, networks and treaties decided today will still be in use. A reader can still imagine being there, and can still change course. “What if?” is the question that drives foresight work at Deftech, the technology foresight programme of armasuisse Science and Technology, the Swiss Federal Office for Defence Procurement (committed in the production of this book). The aim, writes its head Quentin Ladetto in the preface, is not to predict the future, but “to show what it could be if we do not act, or if we act differently.”
Why water? Because it is at the crossroads of everything: agriculture, industry, energy, finance, leisure, health, the military, diplomacy, even art and spirituality. It is also life itself, since we are made of it. A crisis of water is never only about water, and never only local: in the novel, a remote Alpine village spring can decide the fate of a capital.
Why in Switzerland? Because it’s the best place to make the challenges at stake worldwide, since most of the international organizations are based in Geneva and the “water tower of Europe” shares rivers, markets and risks with its neighbours. The novel reminds us of a lesson: upstream or downstream, no one is sovereign alone: national and global interests are intertwined.
What kind of book is it? In an article, Le Point, a French magazine, described it as follows: “In the tradition of the great speculative novels by Jules Verne and Alain Damasio, a techno-thriller that is as gripping as it is compelling.” It is not a dystopia in the vein of Black Mirror, nor a utopia. It depicts an uncertain shadow future, a purgatory without miracles or mirages.
Why choose a novel form, and not a foresight report? H2O 2047 differs from the scenario reports that strategists know well, such as the Global Trends studies of the US National Intelligence Council. Here the scenario is a novel. For a simple reason: as Milan Kundera wrote, echoing Hermann Broch, the novel discovers “what only the novel can discover”. Numbers inform us; only stories make us feel. Seeing events through the eyes of Léa, an engineer, team leader and mother haunted by a fear of fire, brings abstract scenarios to life. The novel becomes a kind of augmented reality. Neither dystopia nor utopia, it depicts a twilight future in which choices still matter.
Below is an extract of H2O 2047 (translated from French):
“What if this water isn’t as pure as it seems?”
There’s nothing to suggest that such a possibility exists. Yet this concern, fueled by years of research on water contaminants, clings to her like a shadow.
She needs to get to the bottom of it.
Léa pulls a few WT-012 test strips from her old bag – left over from her military service. Nathan can’t help but smile mockingly:
“They look like the bandages they used to embalm the pharaohs!”
“Stop being sarcastic. Nothing beats the good old-fashioned methods…”
Léa knows that the lake water is already meticulously monitored, both by humans and by swarms of artificial water striders that constantly patrol and scrutinize it. But when it comes to her son’s health, she can rely only on her own judgment. To dispel any suspicion, she dips the test strips into the water and follows the steps of her old colorimetric test kit one by one.
A few minutes later, the verdict comes down, relentless: a bacterium has infested the lake water.
As one can read, even though it is a novel, H2O 2047 is based on scientific elements. It is the first novel published by the press of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne: the narration is built up with contributions from hydrologists, engineers, military experts and Quentin Ladetto, head of Deftech. It also includes forty engineering illustrations by technical designer Antoine Petiteaux, which add to its scientific depth. Artificial water striders, mentioned in the extract above, have their own drawing, which is used as the cover for the book.
Below are five of these engineers’ drawings, translated into English for the first time, that accompany Léa’s mission to secure the water supply chain. In her mission with Bluecorps, Léa faces five types of disruptions:
– Technological: enzyme-based desalination membranes, magnetic micro-spinners tracking leaks and water theft in pipes, swarms of robotic insects monitoring lakes, smart glasses replacing smartphones, neural signature for identification… Some already exist as prototypes; others are speculative.
– Economic: the UN issues the Aqua, a currency allocated to states according to the water they save. An Ivorian economist insists on counting “virtual water,” the water embedded in imports: producing a kilo of cotton takes around ten thousand litres of water. Rich importing countries discover they are water debtors.
– Social: rationing, climate refugees in 3D-printed housing, cantons asserting their rights to “their” water in disputes with Bern, emergence of new spiritual movements based on the preservation of our “vital sap,” xenophobic violence after water supplies are deliberately poisoned. New types of vegetation and pets, such as the Shiba Chōju, a hybrid dog breed designed to double its life expectancy.
– Art and Lifestyle: the preeminence of water in daily life will probably change our perception of that resource. Water cafés could emerge, supported by the decrease of alcohol consumption among younger generations. A new type of music, “aquatic music”, could also appear as a major trend, with new sensory experiences. In the fashion industry, water may also be part of creations, as the example of water suspenders (see illustration below) shows.
– Geopolitical: as seas rise, the UN revises the Montevideo Convention, which sets out the criteria for statehood. Germany and the Netherlands demand a share of the Swiss glaciers feeding the Rhine; France suspects Switzerland of contaminating the Rhône.
This book offers more than binoculars for seeing far away: the conviction you can build your own ones, adapted for your own country, organization and individual life. For students living in a disruptive world, it is an invitation not to stay fixed on the present, but to imagine what the future will be made of, at every scale, until the planet itself. After reading it, each student might imagine his or her own future. Thinking twenty years ahead, as “H2O 2047” does, is itself a form of action. In a changing and complicated context, those who refuse to imagine the future are doomed to live at its mercy.
Link to H2O 2047: The Water War. https://www.epflpress.org/produit/1649/9782889157778/h2o-2047
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