There is a particular sort of failure that looks, on paper, like bad luck. A fire takes hold on the edge of a town. A river is close enough to be seen from the incident ground. The hydrants are mapped, tested, and dutifully logged. And yet, in the decisive minutes, the one resource that ought to be banal becomes scarce. Water is present, but it is not available. The distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between a contingency and a crisis.
Civil defence doctrine still tends to treat water as a fixed feature of place: stored here, drawn from there, defended against in those zones. That made administrative sense in a world where hydrology was a stable background condition and infrastructure could be designed around “normal”. The difficulty is that “normal” is becoming less operationally meaningful. The World Meteorological Organization’s State of Global Water Resources 2024 describes an “extraordinary year” shaped by record heat and widespread water-related impacts, noting that only about one third of global river basins had “normal” conditions in 2024. Water, in other words, is becoming erratic not merely as a hazard, but as a system property. [WMO State of Global Water Resources 2024].
If risk no longer stays put, a civil defence posture built on stationary assumptions will struggle. We can argue about whether this is climate, land use, urbanisation, or the compound effect of all three. What matters to the operator is that yesterday’s water logic increasingly fails today’s response geometry. The silent message is blunt: static water planning is incompatible with dynamic risk.
Non-stationarity is not a weather story; it is a governance story
Hydrology’s quiet heresy—“stationarity is dead”—is now old enough to vote. The 2008 Science piece that popularised the phrase made a simple claim: historical variability is no longer a reliable default for water-risk planning, because human influence is altering the means and extremes of the water cycle [Science, Milly et al., 2008].
The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report codifies the practical implication at a global scale: additional warming is associated with clearer increases in hot extremes and heavy precipitation, with drought increases in some regions [IPCC AR6 WGI Summary for Policymakers, 2021]. That is not a slogan; it is the removal of a planning convenience. When extremes shift, the assumptions embedded in design standards, mutual aid plans, and reserve margins become brittle.
Yet civil defence systems often still behave as if the water system is a dependable substrate. They invest in fixed assets that presuppose predictable loads: hydrant networks calibrated to local demand, flood defences calibrated to return periods, storage calibrated to historical replenishment. These are not errors. They are the natural outcome of mandates that privilege territorial responsibility over network performance. Water utilities manage their service areas. Fire services manage their jurisdictions. Industrial operators manage their sites. Each is rational within its remit. The failure emerges in the seams: the spaces between mandates where water must be moved, not merely supplied.
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s GAR 2025 hazard exploration on floods is a useful reminder that this is not an abstract concern. It notes that floods account for up to 35–40% of weather-related disaster occurrences; that between 1970 and 2019 water-related hazards accounted for 50% of all disasters and 45% of all reported deaths; and that since 2000 the number of recorded flood-related disasters has risen by 134% compared with the two previous decades [UNDRR GAR 2025 Hazard explorations: Floods]. The same page puts average annual losses from riverine and overflow floods at roughly USD 388 billion globally, with projections rising by mid-century under different emissions scenarios [UNDRR GAR 2025 Hazard explorations: Floods].
Floods are, in a narrow sense, “too much water”. But the deeper issue is that they are too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time. That framing matters because it invites a different kind of capability: not simply barriers, but transport; not simply storage, but routing; not simply defences, but logistics.
Water as a mobile asset, not a local entitlement
It is revealing that we instinctively think of fuel as mobile. We accept that the petrol is not useful where it sits underground; it becomes strategic when it can be refined, transported, stored, and delivered on demand. We have also learnt—sometimes painfully—to treat data the same way: value depends on distribution, redundancy, latency, and the ability to reroute when nodes fail.
Water is physically heavier than both, and politically more sensitive. Yet the same operational principle applies. A litre in a reservoir is not a litre at the nozzle. Water becomes a civil defence asset when it can be mobilised, pressurised, and sustained at the point of need, across distance, terrain, and time. In that sense, the relevant unit is not “volume held” but “flow delivered”: litres per minute at a usable pressure, for a usable duration, over a usable reach.
This is not merely an engineering preference. It is a shift in institutional imagination. A stationary doctrine asks: where is the water? A mobile doctrine asks: where must the water go, and what stands between? The first produces maps. The second produces supply chains.
The Bank for International Settlements, in a December 2025 working paper, makes a parallel argument at the level of macroeconomics. Using cross-country data, it finds water use is associated with higher output, while water scarcity is associated with lower real GDP growth and investment and higher inflation. A one standard deviation increase in water scarcity is associated with reductions in output growth of roughly 0.12–0.16% and in fixed investment growth of roughly 0.39–0.42%, alongside increases in CPI inflation of roughly 2.9–3.5% (depending on the measure) [BIS Working Papers No. 1314, 2025]. That is a central-bank way of saying something that civil defence already knows: when water fails, the costs are not confined to the incident ground.
The OECD’s 2025 working paper on extreme weather events similarly treats shocks as economic phenomena, not isolated tragedies. Using regional data across OECD countries, it finds severe events reduce regional GDP materially, with persistent effects; it also finds that spatial spillovers matter, and that aggregated output losses exceed 0.3% of GDP per year on average, with spillovers accounting for about half [OECD Economics Department Working Papers No. 1837, 2025]. “Weather” becomes a macro variable once it disrupts networks.
If this is the macro context, then water mobility is not a niche operational trick. It is a form of resilience capacity that aligns with the way risk is now behaving: cross-border, cross-sector, and increasingly correlated.
Fire, flood, and continuity are the same problem wearing different uniforms
Firefighting, flood response, and industrial cooling look, on the surface, like separate domains. They are governed by different agencies, funded through different channels, and trained as different specialisms. Yet they share a common vulnerability: each is constrained by the ability to deliver water at scale under adverse conditions.
In large-scale firefighting, the familiar limitation is not only water availability but sustained high-flow delivery. Industrial fires, in particular, are less forgiving of intermittent supply. They require flow, pressure, and endurance, often beyond what local hydrants can provide. Wildfires add geography: the fire front moves, access routes close, and fixed infrastructure is either absent or overwhelmed.
Flooding reverses the vector, but the physics remains the same. Floodwater is rarely a “local” quantity; it is an excess volume moving through a basin. A response posture that depends exclusively on fixed defences and local pumping is vulnerable to the same failure mode as firefighting: the water is there, but the capacity to move it—to where it is less harmful—is inadequate.
Industrial cooling is the quieter cousin. It lacks the drama of sirens, but it is where water becomes a continuity asset. A refinery, a thermal power station, or a major industrial plant cannot improvise cooling capacity without consequence. In a world of tighter margins and more frequent extremes, the difference between controlled shutdown and uncontrolled incident can be the temporary availability of water where the design did not assume it would be needed.
The International Energy Agency captures the interdependence succinctly: the energy sector accounts for roughly 10% of global freshwater withdrawals, and energy is crucial to maintaining water supply—extracting, lifting, pumping, treating, and delivering it [IEA Energy and Water]. That reciprocity should be read as a civil defence issue. When energy is stressed, water supply is stressed; when water is stressed, energy systems are stressed; and when either fails, the costs propagate.
A contemporary example of water mobility in practice
It is one thing to describe water as a mobile asset in theory. It is another to show what “mobility” looks like as infrastructure. The clearest contemporary examples are not dams or pipelines, but containerised systems designed to create temporary, relocatable water networks.
Hytrans’ HydroSub 1400 is a useful case study—not because it is a universal solution, but because it physically embodies the principle. It is described as a mobile pumping unit that, at a specified lift, can deliver approximately 45,000 litres per minute at 12 bar. It uses a marine diesel engine with a heat exchanger system that eliminates the need for a radiator and cooling fan unit, with the stated effect of lowering operating noise levels and saving space within the container. Notably, the product description also states it is not available for countries where emissions regulations apply—an unvarnished reminder that mobility collides with policy constraints as quickly as it collides with physics [Hytrans HydroSub 1400 product page].
The unit’s architecture is telling. It consists of three portable hydraulic submersible pumps feeding a main booster pump installed in a container housing, transported using a truck with a hook-arm lifting system. The hydraulic hose length is stated as 60 metres, giving access to open water at combined distances and vertical lifts within that envelope. It includes control instruments that monitor and record vital parameters and generate alarms when parameters are out of settings, with optional automatic water pressure adjustment [Hytrans HydroSub 1400 product page]. This is not “a pump”; it is a logistics node with instrumentation, transportability, and system discipline.
The broader Hytrans product ecosystem makes the underlying civil defence logic explicit. The catalogue frames water transport as an aboveground, deployable network: large-diameter hoses, hose handling systems, booster modules, and hardware that can create a temporary hydrant-like distribution geometry. The published product descriptions refer to hose diameters extending into the large-scale range (up to 12 inches), with designs oriented towards rapid deployment and recovery rather than permanent installation [Hytrans Products].
Hose recovery is not a glamorous capability, but it is decisive in a world of repeated events. Hytrans’ AutoFlaker is described as a fully automated hose recovery system requiring only one person to retrieve hoses up to 12 inches (300 mm) in diameter, with features designed to recover coupled hoses without disconnection, using sensors and automated rollers [Hytrans AutoFlaker]. The associated Hose Recovery Units are described as enabling continuous retrieval of hoses up to 12 inches, including couplings, using electronically detected and hydraulically managed rollers [Hytrans Hose Recovery Units]. These are labour and time constraints translated into equipment design, which is exactly how logistics becomes doctrine.
Flood response uses the same building blocks. Hytrans’ flood solutions describe a “FloodPump” with a stated capacity of 20,000 litres per minute per unit and a “FloodModule” configuration designed for high-flow water transport with minimum manpower, using lightweight hoses intended for rapid deployment [Hytrans Flood solutions / FloodPump / FloodModule]. The direction of travel differs from firefighting, but the capability is identical: moving water across space at scale.
One should be careful not to turn a case study into a catechism. The value here is not that one manufacturer has discovered water. It is that an entire class of equipment exists whose implicit thesis is that water infrastructure can be temporary, relocatable, and modular. That is the doctrinal provocation.
Mandates, permissions, and the politics of moving water
If water is to be treated as a mobile asset, the first obstacle is rarely technical. It is legal and institutional. Water is governed through rights, abstractions, discharge permits, environmental constraints, and often contested notions of ownership and entitlement. In an emergency, states can override some of this. In a prolonged “non-stationary” era, emergency begins to look uncomfortably like normal operations.
The United Nations University’s January 2026 report Global Water Bankruptcy describes a world in which more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return to historical “normal”, with droughts, shortages, and pollution episodes becoming chronic in many places. It argues for “transparent water accounting” and “enforceable limits”, framing water stress as a post-crisis condition rather than a temporary shock [UNU-INWEH Global Water Bankruptcy, 2026]. This framing matters for civil defence because it suggests a future in which mobilising water cannot rely on exceptionalism. Mobility will require legitimacy, accounting, and pre-agreed rules.
Mandate alignment is equally awkward. In most jurisdictions, fire services do not own water infrastructure. Water utilities do not command incident response. Environmental regulators do not prioritise operational tempo. Defence establishments may have the logistics skill but not the civil mandate. Industry may have assets but not the public accountability to deploy them beyond the fence line. The result is predictable: water mobility sits in the cracks as a “nice-to-have” until it is suddenly the only thing that matters.
Civil defence reform, in this light, is not about buying kit. It is about defining who has authority to move water, under what conditions, using which assets, with what liabilities, and according to which environmental safeguards. The absence of such clarity is itself a risk multiplier.
Financial authorities are beginning to recognise this sort of seam risk in other domains. The OECD’s 2025 guidance on embedding water-related risks in financial stability frameworks treats water as distinct from other environmental risks precisely because it is local in governance but systemic in impact; it argues for more coherent, forward-looking policy responses that connect environmental and financial domains [OECD Embedding water-related risks in financial stability frameworks, 2025]. That is, indirectly, a mandate argument: systems fail when oversight is siloed.
Capital logic: from concrete to capacity
Infrastructure finance tends to favour what can be pointed at. A flood wall photographs well; a pumping capability does not. Yet the economic logic of resilience is moving, slowly, towards capacity that can be redeployed. The question is less “what did we build?” than “what response can we guarantee?”
The IMF’s February 2025 working paper on the macroeconomic effects of natural disasters is instructive for this capital logic. It finds that output growth in advanced economies is not significantly affected by natural disasters in the year of the event, partly because government expenditure responds quickly, offsetting declines in private investment. In emerging markets and developing countries, by contrast, the government expenditure response is smaller and cannot fully mitigate the contemporaneous negative effect on output growth; small islands and countries with limited pre-disaster fiscal space experience more significant declines [IMF Working Paper WP/25/46, 2025]. In plain terms, fiscal capacity is response capacity—and where it is weak, the case for shared or pooled assets becomes stronger.
This is where water mobility fits a more contemporary public-finance sensibility. A modular, containerised system behaves less like a sunk-cost monument and more like a fleet: it can be positioned where risk is most acute, rotated for training, maintained on schedule, and lent under mutual aid. It can be financed as capability, not merely capital stock. That aligns with the broader thinking in climate-resilient infrastructure finance, which increasingly emphasises risk assessment, incentives, and the mobilisation of private capital where public budgets cannot carry the load alone [G20/OECD report on climate-resilient infrastructure, 2024].
There is an additional, more prosaic point. Mobility changes utilisation. A fixed asset in a low-risk location is a stranded investment; a mobile asset can chase the risk curve. That is not a promise of efficiency. It is the purchase of optionality, and optionality is often the most underpriced component of resilience.
What changes when water becomes routable
Treating water as mobile forces a different set of planning questions. The unit of analysis shifts from sites to networks. A civil defence plan can no longer be satisfied with “adequate water sources exist within the region.” It must ask about time-to-flow, maximum sustainable throughput, refuelling and maintenance cycles, hose deployment and recovery rates, spare parts, training, and the interoperability of couplings and control systems. These are the unromantic details that decide whether mobility is real or rhetorical.
It also forces a different relationship with information. The WMO’s State of Global Water Resources 2024 calls for more monitoring and data sharing, warning that without data we “risk flying blind” [WMO State of Global Water Resources 2024]. Mobility amplifies that truth. To move water intelligently, one needs situational awareness not only of the incident, but of source conditions, access routes, competing demands, and environmental constraints. Water mobility without information is simply displacement.
There are limits and trade-offs that deserve to be stated plainly. Mobile pumping at scale is energy-intensive. If the power source is diesel, emissions and local air quality become constraints, not afterthoughts—a reality underscored by the HydroSub 1400’s stated unavailability in jurisdictions where emissions regulations apply [Hytrans HydroSub 1400 product page]. Noise, biosecurity, and contamination risks also matter: drawing from open water during an emergency can carry ecological consequences; discharging floodwater can move pollutants; moving water can spread invasive species. A mature doctrine treats these as design parameters, not inconvenient footnotes.
Nor should mobility become an excuse for neglecting permanent water governance. A system that repeatedly relies on emergency water transport to compensate for chronic scarcity is not resilient; it is improvising. The UNU’s “water bankruptcy” framing is useful precisely because it distinguishes between transient shocks and structural overshoot [UNU-INWEH Global Water Bankruptcy, 2026]. Civil defence must operate in both worlds, but it should not confuse them.
A disciplined conclusion
The argument, then, is not that civil defence has ignored water. It is that it has treated water as a local property rather than a strategic asset with logistics requirements. That framing was plausible when the water cycle was broadly stable and risks were geographically legible. It is becoming less plausible as extremes intensify, hazards correlate, and the costs propagate through supply chains, fiscal positions, and financial systems.
The emerging evidence base is not subtle. WMO describes a water cycle swinging between deluge and drought, with large portions of the world’s basins outside “normal” conditions [WMO State of Global Water Resources 2024]. UNDRR shows water-related hazards dominating disaster statistics and flood losses already measured in hundreds of billions annually [UNDRR GAR 2025 Hazard explorations: Floods]. The BIS quantifies water scarcity as a macroeconomic driver associated with lower growth and higher inflation [BIS Working Papers No. 1314, 2025]. The OECD treats extreme weather as a persistent drag on output, not a one-off shock [OECD Economics Department Working Papers No. 1837, 2025]. Taken together, these sources describe not a temporary emergency, but a changing operating environment.
In that environment, water mobility is best understood as a civil defence capability that makes response geometry flexible rather than fixed. Containerised pumping units, rapid-deployment hose networks, automated recovery systems, and modular flood transport are not merely equipment choices; they are the physical expression of a different doctrine: water is not “where it is”, but “where it must go”. The most rational question for institutions is therefore not “can we afford this?” but “can we afford to remain stationary?”
