RAIN FOR ALL
How can we respond, as educators, to the enormous challenges facing our countries and cities as basic, essential necessities, like clean water, become scarce? To National Geographic Explorer Enrique Lomnitz, this question animated a years-long journey that began with a mission to get Mexico City to start harvesting rainwater, and turned into a country wide effort, involving hundreds of communities and tens of thousands of homes, to help as many people as possible gain their water independence.
From dense urban slums to remote and sparse villages, Enrique and his team’s work has taken them to the deepest corners of Mexico, as they dive into the depths of the water crisis and look for ways out.
Enrique Lomnitz
National Geographic Explorer
Enrique Lomnitz is an industrial designer focused on water access and sustainability. He works on the development of decentralized, autonomous water infrastructure for communities facing high levels of water insecurity in both urban and rural Mexico, primarily through the promotion of rainwater harvesting. Lomnitz’s organization, Isla Urbana, mostly works in low-income, peri-urban neighborhoods, and in remote rural and indigenous communities, where it has installed over 20,000 rainwater harvesters since 2009. Isla Urbana has had significant influence on public policy, developing and demonstrating strategies to transfer rainwater harvesting knowledge to the population, and it has designed and advised rainwater harvesting programs and policy for governments at the local, state, and federal levels in Mexico. Lomnitz is an Ashoka Fellow, a UBS Visionary, and was named one of MIT Technology Review’s “35 Innovators Under 35.” He hopes to help Mexico City transition from its current unsustainable water management practices to become the first major urban center to fully integrate domestic rainwater harvesting into its water management strategy.