2035: The Day the River Started Talking
How Real-Time Environmental Intelligence Will Redefine EHS Compliance and ESG Accountability
Thanks to advances in technology, we are learning to decode whale song. We are beginning to recognize bird calls. And we are starting to understand dolphin whistles. We are on the verge of the first true human-nonhuman conversation in history.
For the first time ever, advances in sensing, data infrastructure, and AI make it possible to listen and respond to the Earth’s voices and signals.
The next frontier is decoding the entire interconnected ecosystem. A river expresses stress long before it turns brown. A watershed signals instability long before it floods.
Today, we can stream the life of that watershed — flow rates, conductivity, turbidity, temperature, pH — into a continuous system.
Yet as of 2026, most organizations still trap that stream inside forms, spreadsheets, compliance reports, and static dashboards.
We are listening.
But we are not yet conversing.
I’m not going to make any product predictions in this essay. Instead, I’m going to share my worldview forecast. A look at what EHS compliance will look like by 2035 once the web undergoes its next great shift, and which old habits will not survive it.
The most important shift that will enable us to converse with our living environment, from the river to the reef, is architectural, not regulatory.
The old web was about publishing: a place for statements, documents, and static claims. The new web is much more alive and event-driven. Signals flow through AI-native systems that exchange verifiable facts in real time. A single-source-of-truth becomes a continuous stream of truth. Once you accept that, the entire logic of today’s “reporting” workflows feels archaic. Filing a quarterly compliance report is like mailing your heartbeat to a hospital every three months, hoping no one needs it sooner.
In the world we live in now, environmental truth usually arrives late. After the samples travel from the field to the lab. After spreadsheets get reconciled. After debates about whether an outlier “counts.” After the calendar says it’s time to submit. By the time the story becomes official, the river has already carried the truth downstream.
But imagine a different world.
A world where water quality isn’t something we report, but something we maintain. Like a patient on life support. Continuous telemetry. Always on. Forever.
By 2035, don’t expect major upgrades to today’s EHS compliance or ESG software. Expect compliance to operate on an entirely new architecture and web.
Reporting has been a workaround until now
We still run EHS and ESG like paperwork dressed up as software. We buy platforms, bolt on features, and believe the future will be “the same process, but faster.” We debate definitions, chase assurance, and polish disclosures for regulators, investors, and boards.
Reporting, as designed for the old web, has been a workaround.
The compliance stack was built for a world where most measurements were manual, sensors were rare, identities were inconsistent, and audit trails were thin. Analyst teams had to assemble evidence, reconcile versions, and ship reports on a schedule. Reporting made sense because the underlying system (i.e., reality) could not speak for itself. But with advancements in automation and AI, that is quickly changing.
AI (models and LLMs) is only part of the shift. The underlying data and architecture to access it represent the biggest opportunity for the future we envision. AI performs poorly on PDFs, exports, and disconnected systems with mismatched definitions and timelines. AI performs well when data is standardized, continuously updated, tied to stable identifiers, and recorded with integrity.
The next decade will not be won by a smarter dashboard. The next decade will be won by an improved infrastructure underneath. A web-native, multitenant database that makes compliance data continuous, auditable, and ready for automation.
Multitenant is not a pricing model
Multitenant architecture reflects a shift in worldview. Cost efficiency may follow, but the real change is philosophical.
Multitenant systems prevent each company from inventing its own version of an “incident,” a “permit limit,” an “exceedance,” “scope boundary,” or “effluent.” Multitenancy enables shared semantics; a discharge limit means the same thing upstream and downstream, across facilities, regulators, and ecosystems.
Therefore, a strong foundation of standardized inputs, along with a multitenant platform and tooling, enables AI to reach its full potential. Companies that focus on making the world more legible for AI will have the biggest opportunities to effect positive change for the environment and shareholders.
By 2035, compliance is infrastructure
The most uncomfortable prediction is also the most likely:
By 2035, EHS compliance and ESG will not be about the software you buy. They will be about the infrastructure you connect to.
There will be no bespoke platform per company. No modular universe of air, water, carbon, and supplier risk stitched together behind the firewall. Those ideas belong to an era when every organization pretended it ran its own planet.
In 2035, environmental truth is no longer a company-level possession.
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Organizations will connect to a globally integrated, permissioned data fabric, harmonized at the planetary level, that links emissions sources, permits, thresholds, and ecosystems into a single living system. Not a single government database like the EPA IBM mainframe from the seventies. Not a vendor monopoly. Something closer to DNS or GPS: shared infrastructure that nobody owns, the way you own a product, but everybody depends on it, the way you depend on roads or the internet.
And because trust alone cannot sustain shared truth, the fabric will carry its own memory of integrity. Call it blockchain. Call it a cryptographic audit. Call it tamper-evident provenance. The name matters less than the behavior: data carries its chain of custody the way a river carries sediment or contaminants, where it came from, what touched it, and whether it was altered.
Verification stops being an annual ritual and becomes a default condition.
In that world, regulators don’t need your report.
They need your signal.
Compliance stops being a calendar event and becomes a continuous state — an always-on relationship between limits and reality. When nothing exceeds, nothing happens. When something drifts, the system warns. When something crosses the line, the system acts.
The report is the stream.
The audit is the provenance.
The submission is meaningless.
Water arrives first
Water is where this future lands first because water doesn’t tolerate fiction. Unlike air, water keeps receipts. It’s the universal solvent: it touches everything, cleans everything, and carries away whatever we fail to control. And once something is in the water, “removal” isn’t a metaphor. It’s a cost. It demands infrastructure and energy — energy we don’t have to waste. When that energy isn’t renewable, it becomes carbon.
Air emissions are one-way. If you don’t capture them before release, you don’t get a second chance. They disperse, dilute, and do their work somewhere else — immediately or later, invisibly and cumulatively. Water is different. Contamination moves through pathways. It leaves a trail. Most of the time, you can trace it back, find it in transit, and intercept it — contain, treat, or remove it before it spreads the damage.
Carbon is planetary and abstract — so abstract we’ve built an entire narrative industry around it. Almost like a religion. Water is local, embodied, finite. It runs through pipes, fields, factories, and cities. It shows up in the lungs and kidneys need it. When water goes wrong, you don’t get to debate it. It is not political. Not Republican. Not Democrat.
That’s why the water system of 2035 will look like healthcare, not in the bureaucracy sense, but in the life-support sense. Watersheds will be monitored like ICU patients: continuous telemetry, redundant sensors, automatic validation, anomaly detection, and provenance embedded in every measurement. No waiting for someone to notice. No waiting for someone to file. No waiting for someone to confess.
And because the web finally does what it was always meant to do — move reliable signals between systems — the response won’t be a memo. It will be control: throttling discharges, rerouting intakes, dispatching crews, alerting downstream operators before the plume arrives.
The goal won’t be “document water quality.”
It will be “stabilize water quality.”
That is the moral pivot of the next era: from storytelling to stewardship.
The new compliance workforce
In 2035, compliance professionals will no longer write narratives. They will be supervising agents.
AI agents will reconcile sensor data with production volumes. They will detect drift, tampering, and suspicious gaps. They will forecast exceedances before they occur, simulate operational changes, and propose corrective actions. Human judgment remains — but above the mechanics: approving actions, resolving edge cases, debating policy where values matter.
The vendors who thrive will not be the ones who make reporting prettier. They will be the ones who make truth more continuous, more verifiable, and more actionable. They will operate standards, identity, provenance, and optimization engines that keep systems within limits with minimal waste.
The rest will sell artifacts to a world that no longer needs artifacts.
Infrastructure outlives politics
Shared systems become civilization-critical. Civilization-critical systems become resilient. Resilient systems replicate.
A planetary environmental ledger, if it truly becomes the nervous system of compliance, water, and survival, will become part of humanity’s long memory. If future generations leave Earth, they won’t just carry culture and science. They’ll carry the record of what happens when truth is treated like paperwork.
A Noah’s Ark of data. Not as punishment. As prevention.
We are not there yet. We are still in adolescence: definitions, boundaries, assurance debates, spreadsheets dressed up as platforms, reporting cycles that pretend reality respects deadlines.
But the arc is clear.
The web is becoming a nervous system.
Multitenant, web-native databases are becoming the shared language.
Tamper-evident provenance is becoming the default trust.
AI agents are becoming operators.
And reporting — as ritual, as narrative, as a substitute for continuous truth — will soon feel as outdated as mailing your heartbeat.
In 2035, the planet won’t wait for your report.
It will read your telemetry.
And when the river speaks, it won’t file a report.
It will speak in data and signals. The question is whether we will have built the systems capable of understanding and responding to it.
