Barrier 1: Lack of Holistic Approaches

2. BARRIER: Centralized, Slow-toChange Systems

Actionable Solution: Utilize more decentralized impact methods

Responding rapidly to the climate crisis is made more difficult due to the bureaucracy embedded in our institutions. Rather than waiting for economic and policy incentives to manifest, businesses and individuals must embrace proactive change, whether on a small or large scale. Intrapreneurs—individual changemakers who launch new initiatives for social and environmental change from within their institutions—have sparked some of society’s most important shifts through their first steps. Enabling changemakers to boldly respond to the climate crisis in their workplace, organization, or community will help to bridge the chasm between public calls-to-action and slowmoving systems.

Local-level governments were much quicker to recognize the failings of the conventional water management model [than city-level governments], and to say we need solutions for where the system fails. Now the conversation is starting to go beyond the people working in the water supply field or those who live in houses disconnected from the grid. It’s started to make its way into the broader public imagination, and people are talking about it.

Enrique Lomnitz, Founder and General Director of Isla Urbana. Ashoka Fellow

Rising to the Challenge

Ashoka Fellow Enrique Lomnitz, Founder and General Director of Isla Urbana, is demonstrating the potential of decentralized action and increased participation in his efforts to solve water shortages in Mexico City. Isla Urbana overlays a distributed network of thousands of houses harvesting rainwater on top of Mexico’s existing water supply system. Enrique’s complement to the existing infrastructure redistributes participation and enables each house to contribute and gather their own water. Isla Urbana’s system presents a significant paradigm shift, prompting a change in the way communities, individuals, and governments think about how they get their own water. For years, the primary actors were individuals supporting rainwater harvesting from hyper-local government districts in Mexico City where water was scarcer.

Through grassroots activation and project collaboration, Isla Urbana’s model garnered the interest of the Mexico City government and became a tenant of city-level public policy.

The model, however, was not merely successful because Enrique approached the city government. Isla Urbana’s strategic approach, beginning in communities where the water crisis was most pronounced, created a change in thinking at the grassroots level, which moved from individual households to the government.