Water's Future: Innovation and Technology will drive greater water sustainability and resilience

Take a breather for a moment. Consider a drop of water that falls into a river. As the river flows, this drop settles in the underlying groundwater, where it is absorbed by the roots of a tree, which then feeds a broader ecosystem. It evaporates there and then falls as rain into a newly ploughed potato patch.

In a second iteration of the cycle, the drop lands in the tap of a family who is for the first time receiving water at their home, allowing a little girl to shower before going to school rather than fetching water from the nearest well, which is an hour away.

The same drop is cleaned in a wastewater treatment plant before flowing gently through a hydropower dam in a given country, generating energy for a textile plant in a nearby country that employs 200 locals. Water is important and basic for life and goes through all aspects of development. It drives economic progress, supports healthy ecosystems, and is essential and fundamental for life itself.

Climate change, on the other hand, manifests itself in the form of water. Water-related natural disasters account for nine out of ten natural disasters, posing climatic threats to food, energy, urban, and environmental systems. If we are to meet our climate and development goals, water must be at the centre of our adaptation efforts in order to rebuild more effectively.

On the one hand, maintaining safe access to water and sanitation has a direct influence on a community's health and well-being, which in turn has an impact on education attainment and employment productivity, contributing to poverty reduction. Appropriate water management, on the other hand, can have a major positive impact on agriculture, environmental safety, public health, and energy generation. Given these two-way interconnections, looking beyond single-sector solutions becomes more important, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.

In developing countries, the World Bank is the major multilateral source of water financing. It focuses on a number of interconnected sectors such as water supply, sanitation, water resources management, and water in agriculture, working hand in hand with partners to achieve a water-secure world for all.

As the world's population grows to more than 9 billion people by 2050, it's more critical than ever to create more with less. Governments in the developing world will need to strengthen the sector's resilience and sustainability as the water supply and sanitation continues to confront rising pressures, particularly due to the effects of climate change. Scarcity and safety, water efficiency, utility operations, monitoring and treatment, and data and analytics all benefit from innovation and technology. Utilities and businesses are increasingly eager to test and embrace promising technologies.

What do you believe the future water tech scenario looks like? Will it include drones that inspect and repair leaks inside pipes? Will consumer feedback be automatically collected and used to inform service changes? Will you be able to use crypto-currencies to pay for services? Well, these may happen over years. At present, every day, water utilities encounter issues that limit their ability to provide even safe and drinkable water to consumers in their service areas.

These issues range from the inability to fund operational expenditures to the inability to provide water to all inhabitants 24 hours a day. The effects of climate change, as well as other hazards such as COVID-19, are exacerbating these problems. As a result, it's more necessary than ever to think outside the box, not just focusing on immediate requirements, but also fostering long-term innovations that will enable utilities to deal with short- and long-term issues while providing safe and reliable universal water supply and sanitation services.

It is critical that technological innovations are supported by governments since they have the potential to save and improve lives in both developed and poor countries. As a result, water sector investments must continue to flow. Both the development and technology sectors must take an interdisciplinary approach to innovation in order to produce long-term solutions that will benefit future generations.

Insanity, according to Albert Einstein, is defined as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Traditional approaches to water are ineffective in addressing new environmental issues. Let us continue to turn technological inertia and procrastination into enhanced creativity and invention as we enter in a new year. Our experts at Maithri Aquatech have been leading this drive over many years.

How is Maithri Aquatech's mission towards paranoid innovation in safeguarding humanity and changing the world progressing?

Maithri has developed a world-class innovative solution to install Atmospheric Water Generation (AWG) systems, which are reliable sources of clean, safe water in areas where water is scarce, difficult to obtain, or polluting. Atmospheric water generation (AWG) is a method for extracting drinkable water from the atmosphere that has the potential to boost water availability in the event of shortages, pollution accidents, or other issues that could impair drinking water supply.

Small domestic systems that can produce 25 litres per day to massive commercial machines that can produce over 10,000 litres per day, AWG systems come in a variety of sizes. The air temperature and the amount of water vapour (i.e., humidity) present have a considerable impact on the rate of water production. Maithri has developed a cutting-edge system known as “MEGHDOOT” that gathers ambient water vapour and converts it into microbe-free drinkable water.

Maithri's AWG systems are utilized in a variety of industries, including agriculture, construction, farms, hospitals, hotels, residential, rural areas, navy, fisheries, defense, educational institutions, and more. These systems do not require a water supply, may operate off the grid, do not waste water, and offer clean drinking water as needed. They don't rely on finite natural resources and don't emit any carbon dioxide. Because renewable energy is used, there are no direct or indirect emissions.

Maithri experts take the mission even further, believing that it is not enough to simply supply clean water by installing water systems and then walking away; compassion requires us to connect with the communities and teach them how to be sustainable in the long run. One way to do so is to keep a long-term implementation plan in place. Providing safe drinking water includes a lot more. It requires investing in people, establishing safe water systems, teaching for long-term sustainability, and generating hope in order to be truly successful. Societies must work together to end the global water crisis.

Industries, entrepreneurs, government agencies must move quickly to address the water crisis and avoid it from getting worse. The only way water can be secured for everyone is through constant innovation, investment, and teamwork, as well as ensuring that services are sustainable and resilient to climate shocks. In order to save our world, we must act NOW.

Talk to our experts today and learn more about the future of water, and how innovation and technology will drive greater water sustainability and resilience around the world.

Emerging global climate-water risks, a system-based approach to water management is need of the hour

Various geographical regions have been hit by heatwaves and droughts in recent weeks. Infrastructure, social, and environmental systems are currently coping with climate extremes in the west of the United States, the south of Brazil, and the Middle East, to name a few regions. The scientific community believes that this year's droughts in Brazil are the worst in a century, while the recent droughts in the United States are the worst in 1,200 years.

Droughts are causing water systems to struggle as a result of the consequences. Lake Mead, the reservoir constructed by the Hoover Dam, the country's largest reservoir, has been declared under historic deficit in the United States. This has resulted in unprecedented water shortages across the majority of the Southwest United States, hurting important economic sectors. The five interconnected reservoirs that make up the Cantareira system in Brazil, which distributes water to places like Sao Paolo, are currently functioning at 40% capacity. In countries like Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, reservoirs are reporting severely low water levels.

Failing water systems have consequences for key industries such as food and electricity. The initial effects may extend beyond the local level, reaching national and transnational levels. Failure of hydropower production in Brazil would result in a 15% increase in electricity rates. In addition, as a result of less available water for irrigation, food costs have risen, particularly for sugar and cocoa.

Failing crops in Iraq are hurting farmer incomes and increasing reliance on food and water imports. Households and companies in Iraq and Lebanon are suffering from critical power shortages and unreliable regional interconnections because they cannot afford private generators.

A more interconnected and changing world, where local water hazards have far-reaching global consequences, necessitates a novel outlook on the water sector. This new strategy must incorporate the following elements:

Expand your water system's horizons

Water and related systems are frequently evaluated via local lenses, with their scope limited to the immediate utility (or hazard) they provide. The complex structure of modern society and economies necessitates a broadening of this vision. The extent to which droughts in Brazil affect food security and inflation in food-importing countries necessitate re-imagining the true geographic boundaries of what is commonly referred to as a water system.

Consider elements other than hydro climatological and infrastructural

Expanding the water sector's limits also necessitates careful consideration of the links that water creates in the sociological, economic, and institutional sectors. The impact of water and climate shocks on energy transformation efforts, as well as energy security goals, necessitates a rethinking of what constitutes a resilient energy-water system.

Water security and climate resilience frameworks must be reconciled with domains such as international trade and relations, food and energy, country-level socioeconomic goals, and comprehensive analysis of systematic interdependencies.

Recognize that the water and related sectors have ever-changing and uncertain characteristics

Droughts aren't the only dangers associated with climate change and water. In Belgium, China, Germany, and other nations, the resilience of socioeconomic institutions have been put to the test in recent months by enormous floods. During the unexpected cold wave in Texas this February, the vital links between climate energy and water supply were also put to the test.

Yet, especially in a changing climate, the mid-and long-term characteristics of water risks are difficult to forecast. This underlines the importance of planning water and interdependent systems while taking into account the variety of risks and causes of change (including those unrelated to climate change) and offering solutions that are resilient in the face of possible futures.

The effects of rising temperatures on water security are numerous. For starters, it means that evaporation from all water bodies will be higher. It indicates that we must not only work on storing water in millions of structures, but also on lowering evaporation losses.

For far too long, India has overlooked the management of groundwater systems in favor of irrigation bureaucracies based on planned canals and other surface water systems. However, in this age of climate change and water scarcity, this will need to alter. We also need to figure out how to reduce losses from tanks, ponds, and canals. It's not that evaporation losses haven't occurred in the past; nevertheless, as temperatures rise, the rate of evaporation will increase. As a result, we must plan ahead and do more.

Increased heat will cause soil moisture to evaporate, making the ground dusty and increasing the requirement for irrigation. It will exacerbate land degradation and dust bowl formation in countries like India, where the majority of food is still cultivated in rainfed regions watered by rain. This means that water management must be combined with plantation planning in order to improve soils' ability to hold water, even during periods of extreme and extended heat.

Heat will, of course; increase the use of water, from drinking and irrigation to fighting down forest fires. Devastating forest fires have already raged in many regions of the world, including India's forests. As the temperature rises, this will only get worse. As a result of the increased demand for water as a result of climate change, it is even more critical that we do not have wastewater.

This isn't all, though. Climate change is already manifesting itself in an increase in the number of intense rain events. This indicates that rain will likely fall in the form of a flood, intensifying the cycle of floods followed by droughts. India already has fewer rainy days every year, with an average of only 100 hours of rain per year. The number of rainy days will continue to decline, but the number of extreme rainy days will rise.

Water security is under threat as competing socioeconomic and environmental demands make it difficult to manage this precious resource effectively. Local solutions must include the ecology of individual watersheds as well as how communities use resources. More than just the most easily measurable components of water management, such as water quantity or quality, we must collaborate across traditional water management silos (water usage and governance, riparian landscape management, ecological conservation, and so on) to integrate these elements into our solutions.

Top-down approaches, according to Maithri Aquatech's specialists, are ideal for climate change mitigation but inappropriate and possibly detrimental for water. A planetary water boundary, for example, may have aided in bringing attention to the global water crisis a decade ago, but it significantly oversimplifies water security. Setting a limit on global human water use does not solve the water crisis' numerous complexities, nor does it make sense given the world's unequal distribution of water.

Water footprint assessments and water offsets also tend to oversimplify the intricacies of freshwater ecosystems, failing to account for the diversity of local impacts, livelihoods, and stakeholder requirements. These methodologies commonly evaluate the value of water as a physical resource to the numerous additional benefits given by freshwater ecosystems, as well as the costs of restoring these non-equivalent commodities.

The greater focus on bottom-up solutions that address local and regional water issues allows for more flexible management in response to new knowledge and changing circumstances. This will be especially crucial as governments and industry bodies must incorporate greater flexibility into their water management in order to deal with climate change's less predictable effects.

While highlighting the distinctions, our specialists hold a consistent belief in the decision-scaling method that we use in water management and climate adaptation. Climate and environment are examined in the context of stakeholder-defined demands in decision-scaling. Stakeholders such as planners, engineers, and conservationists will need to drive the process from the ground up.

Let's be clear about something: we needed to be obsessive with water and its management since water is the basis of health and wealth. However, we must now be more than obsessive; we must be resolute and intentional. This is the true make-or-break moment in our history.

Talk to our experts today and get a deeper understanding of global climate-water risks and why a strong system-based approach to water is a critical need of the hour.

Maithri Aquatech