Eight years ago, the legendary founder of Intel Corporation, Andrew S. Grove, published a book that could have been written explicitly for established players in today’s global water and sanitation industry.

In Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove argues that leaders of dominant institutions must be relentlessly on guard for unpredictable yet inevitable challenges to their position – prepared for what he calls Strategic Inflection Points – in order to adapt to sudden changes or risk becoming irrelevant.

Grove’s own crunch point arrived in the late-1990’s, upon discovering a flaw at the heart of Intel’s business – the Pentium processor was expensive and there were two new insurgents, Cyrix and AMD, who started producing cheaper chips eroding part of Intel’s business. Someone else might have put up walls and let his company go the way of Wang, Atari, Netscape, RIM (Blackberry) or Myspace. Instead, he turned the crisis into an opportunity to innovate, diversifying Intel’s product range with the Celeron Processor that became the highest volume product in the company, and making the business more robust, resilient and relevant to society than ever before.

While hard, this mindset is an existential requirement. In the water sector, we ignore such warnings at our peril.

Many of the world’s leading water companies have been around for decades, even centuries. They enjoy high prestige, low staff turnover, and healthy margins. Few see threats from competitors sneaking up to steal their metered customers who are, after all, tethered to miles of buried pipes. As natural monopolies, incumbent water and sanitation institutions most likely feel safe, comfortable, and insulated from competition.

They aren’t. Innovators are disrupting the old business models and there is little room for complacency in water and wastewater utilities.

Imagine, one day a new company or housing developer starts implementing small, decentralised systems to remote peri-urban areas where your services are either poor or nonexistent. Once they have perfected their business model in these remote areas, they start to adapt their systems to attract your networked customers. No problem. It’s just a few homes and the majority of your income is derived from larger commercial, institutional and industrial users.

The next month one of your oldest corporate clients announces they will no longer require your services. The firm has turned to a modular company that has perfected decentralised technology for a closed-loop system that costs half of what you’ve been charging.

As revenue projections begin to look shaky, you discover that a third of your clients are now using smartphone apps and slashing consumption. That’s good for the resource but puts a severe strain on your bottom line. Your board, or regulators, are reluctant to raise rates.

Looking ahead, you seek to make up the shortfall by adding more and more new families and firms from semirural areas or peri-urban settlements. Except both groups have begun to bypass your pipes and sewers for distributed systems. In the developing world, competing teams of Uberlike trucks deliver water and waste services. In affluent cities, accounts may simply go ‘off the grid’ producing their own energy to pump and clean their own water from rooftop to tank and back again.

Each innovation makes the slope increasingly slippery. These relentless waves of ingenuity only compound existing pressures: a fast changing climate, rapid urbanisation, the emergence of more persistent pollutants and austere public budgets. The shocks come on top of what many water professionals recognise as a ‘well functioning but unsustainable business model’. As efficient use erodes the revenues needed to cover costs, it brings pressure to defer maintenance, trim ‘excessive’ testing costs or cut corners.

While this may seem far-fetched, we live in an era of disruption. Yet all too often, we water professionals – especially within older public and private legacy bodies – have shown ourselves averse to not only risk but also to the endless potential of innovation itself. It is time to recognise our sector’s many “strategic inflection points” not as threats or crises to avoid but rather as opportunities to experiment, to retrofit, to disrupt ourselves from within, taking steps so that we can individually and institutionally emerge stronger and
more valuable than before.

In David and Goliath, author Malcolm Gladwell argues that in hindsight, yet contrary to ourassumptions, it was obvious that the amateur would ‘disrupt’ the professional warrior. The shepherd boy was young, nimble, fit, agile, and had mastered technology that let him triumph over his competitor from afar, without warning. David felt highly motivated to change, adapt to the field and innovate.

The giant Goliath was large, slow, weighed down by heavy infrastructure (shield, helmet, armour and sword) that only made sense at close range. Goliath, burdened by past success, was complacent. The good news is that disruptive innovation need not be a zero-sum game in which only one side emerges victorious. Indeed, there’s no reason
why water utilities cannot learn from insurgents, engage with new thinking, and embrace innovation to update their business models to deliver new solutions that benefit all. As a global organisation that represents scientists, researchers, technology companies, and water and wastewater utilities, IWA has a central role to play in bridging the chasm between innovation and practice.

The IWA’s network is where these ideas are being fermented; where both innovators and adopters of new technologies and approaches can bring the push and pull of innovation together. The IWA can provide the platform that helps utilities recognise emerging disruption, help them learn from it, and help them adapt and embrace change. Within the IWA network are prominent opinion leaders, the people Malcom Gladwell refers to as ‘Mavens’: “They are the ones who make it possible for innovations to overcome this problem of the chasm. They are translators: they take ideas and information from a highly specialised world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand.” If the IWA can identify and mobilse our own Mavens, we will be in a strong position to accelerate the diffusion of innovation.

In an era of rapid transformation, where climate change will demand adaptive solutions, the circular economy will see water companies become resource miners, and digital water will bring automation and connect the sector to the Internet of Things, the IWA has never been more relevant. Rather than choose distributed versus centralised, small versus big, we will continue to link the most promising developments and optimal solutions, sharing the best from around the world.

The post Why the water sector must embrace disruptive innovation – before it’s too late appeared first on The Source.

Throughout history, securing a reliable and safe water supply, and dealing with wastewater, have been two of the driving forces behind the development of human populations. Entire civilizations have grown and vanished in response to water availability and their environmental impact on water resources. What was true for ancient Babylonians and Maya continues to be true today: water management remains one of the greatest human challenges.

The technologies and science we apply today would be alien to our forebears, but scientists and engineers continue to respond to water challenges through the research and development of new water and wastewater treatment technologies; find new ways to extract value from wastewater through resource recovery; and implement sanitation treatment systems and technologies that improve both human and environmental health.

Addressing these critical issues was central to the recent IWA 15th Leading Edge Conference on Water and Wastewater Technologies in Nanjing, China. It brought together researchers and practitioners who are passionate about exploring and applying leading edge water solutions for the 21st century. This sector-leading event gives new insights into how pioneering science, technological innovation and leading practices are shaping the major transformation in water management that is underway. Amongst the hot topics debated during the meeting, several key emerging trends, likely to disrupt the water sector, were highlighted:

Towards a holistic ‘urban water cycle’ approach
In practice, water professionals have started to rethink and optimize water systems, moving to urban systems that integrate drinking water and wastewater systems for Direct Potable Reuse, tapping conventional water resources, increased use of resource recovery, as well as considering natural-based solutions in urban water management.

Breakthroughs in addressing emerging contaminants
An increased presence of emerging contaminants, such as pharmaceuticals, personal care products or pathogenic microorganisms, not only threaten the quality of water sources and wastewater streams around the world, but challenge the efficiency of current treatment processes. There is mounting urgency to advance research on innovative treatment technologies that can control these emerging contaminants and protect human health. Some promising modern tools and approaches include advanced oxidations, digital information technology, and state-of-the-art molecular genetics tools.

Application of advanced and new materials for water treatment
Looking at the evolution of water and wastewater treatment technologies, the rapid development and application of advanced materials has increased efficiency and decreased costs for water treatment. These include multifunctional membranes, nano technologies, novel catalysts and high capacity absorbents.

Engineering of microbiomes to fight antibiotic resistance
Fascinating developments in the microbial field have seen the application of microbiome engineering become more important for enhancing wastewater treatment and drinking water quality. Microbial control is getting renewed relevance and urgency with the rise of super bugs.

Digital water
Smart technologies are driving efficiencies across sectors, and water is no exception. Smart meters, sensors or real-time control solutions are becoming an indispensable asset for water utilities to improve overall performance. By increasing their ability to operationalize data into practical solutions, such as detecting leaks, utilities are able to reduce water loss and reduce energy consumption.

Tailored solutions to improve water quality and wastewater treatment in the Global South
More attention is now being focused on the improvement of water services and wastewater treatment in countries in the Global South. Small and decentralized water systems are increasingly applied together with onsite solutions (such as Non-Sewered Sanitation), to reach increasing numbers of previously unserved or underserved people.

The IWA’s Leading Edge Technology Conference is an important incubator for accelerating the development and diffusion of new technologies and leading edge practices. As the world faces a future of increased water scarcity, growing demand for water, and more frequent and severe water events such as floods and droughts, our response has to rise to the challenge.

Join us at the 16^th IWA Leading Edge Technology Conference to be held in Edinburgh, UK, 10-14 June 2019, and be part of the solution.

Find out more here and visit the LET website for upcoming updates at http://iwa-let.org/

The post What will be the leading edge water solutions of the 21st century? appeared first on The Source.

Water visions precede action. Yet it’s easy to offer “building blocks” to plan “sustainable urban water systems” that inform and govern “resilient and liveable cities.” What’s hard is showing how and where to implement such an ambitious and judicious framework on the ground.

How can water professionals align theory with practice? To find out, The Source set up a test.

Our IWA colleagues recently established seventeen Water-Wise Principles under four levels of action (see previous article on page 28), robust enough for any city, at least on paper. Of course, people don’t live on paper. By 2030 some 6 billion of us will live in cities growing increasingly hot, dry, and crowded.

So we raised the bar. We chose and arranged alphabetically 17 volatile cities–each faces acute water insecurity in geographically distinct regions, caused by historically unique forces and in our opinion, each is broadly representative of urban water crises shared by all–and then we tried to mix and match each principle to a city, to test theory against practice.

We came up with the following, which we hope is both pragmatic and useful. But you be the judge, and feel free to rearrange the cities in any order, or send your own examples to the editor (editor@thesourcemagazine.org).

1. Replenish waterbodies and their ecosystems

Beijing

Challenge: As the city’s average annual 578 millimetres rainfall declines, its dependence on groundwater brings risks of its own. In the 1960s, hydrologists recall bubbling springs and rice paddies across an area half the size of Belgium, now paved over, built up, and ringed by seven roads. Since 1990, the city has doubled from 10 to 20 million people, and sucked
down the water table 100 metres in that time. Municipal treatment plants and a massive water transfer scheme are locked in a race to meet demand. China’s former water resources minister Wang Shucheng  once warned that at current rates of extraction, cities like Beijing will run dry in 15 years. He said that eleven years ago.

Application: China’s capital must take from, and discharge to the polluted Yongding River only what the natural basin can give or absorb, reduce groundwater extraction to renewable levels, and protect ecosystems from run-off

2. Reduce the amount of water and energy used

Cape Town

Challenge: After two years of record low rainfall, Mayor Patricia de Lille announced in March that South Africa’s Mother City of nearly 4 million people has 80 days before it runs out of water. Theewaterskloof Dam and five smaller reservoirs hold less than a third; the last ten percent is unusable. “We are in a real crisis,” de Lille told Bloomberg news. “People will have to change the way they are doing things. You can only save water while you have water.”

Application: Rather than blame tourists, informal settlements, and firefighters, the Mother City’s residents must curb their addiction to lawns, car-washing and swimming pools, thus minimising the amount of water taken from storage, and the energy required to move and treat its urban waters.

3. Reuse, Recover, Recycle

Gaza City

Challenge: The 700,000 people of Palestine’s largest city face a shortage from several directions. The vital aquifer has suffered partial saline contamination as rapid freshwater
depletion is replaced by seawater seepage. Bombs in the ongoing war with Israel have damaged US$34 million of Gaza’s water infrastructure, undermining the already thin, leaky
network of reservoirs and pipelines. Customers, 80 percent of whom depend on aid, can rarely afford even subsidised water rate tariffs.

Application: Right now, scattered rain falls on hard surfaces, wasting runoff that has nowhere to go. Devolving funds and authority to local management could help capture, recover, and upcycle these and other diverse sources of water with treatment that matches “fit for purpose” water.

4. Use a systemic approach integrated with other services

Istanbul

Challenge: Turkey’s ancient city of 14 million people links Europe and Asia, but struggles to bridge the escalating gap between the supply of and demand for safe water. The city strives to control pollution, taking precautions at industrial zones and business districts. Each month it purifies ten million cubic metres of water in a hundred wastewater and drinking water stations that are monitored online with broadband technology.

Application: Istanbul can consider different parts of its water system–waste, energy, nutrients–as a whole, to reduce and reuse while improving services costs.

5. Increase the modularity of systems and ensure multiple options

Lagos

Challenge: Activists blame World Bank privatisation, engineers blame neglect and corruption and officials blame uncontrolled sprawl. But all agree Nigeria’s megacity of 21 million people, built on a lagoon, suffers water insecurity. The Iju and Adiyan treatment plants are in disrepair. The system is understaffed and people are under-trained. Only 10 percent of the
city has secure access to safe water from a creaky public system. The rest rely on private suppliers, drill boreholes, or tap illegally into pipes. Age, stress, and such makeshift connections combine to create perhaps the world’s highest  non-revenue water rate, where more clean water is lost than reaches homes, schools, hospitals and industry.

Application: “The city’s water and sanitation sector has deteriorated to this point because of the way it has been managed for many years,” says UN special rapporteur on water, Leo Heller. To reverse this vicious cycle, Lagos can build in redundancy, of resource, treatment, storage and conveyance options.

6. Enable regenerative water services

Jakarta

Challenge: In this coastal, tropical capital of 10 million, when it rains, it floods. That poses a clean water challenge, made worse by underground construction that obstructs and intercepts the flow of groundwater down to 60 metres deep. The lack of absorption reduces storage and causes an acute local dry season drought. Urban environmental technology chief Arie Herlambang warns: “Jakarta citizens will be hit by both flood and a lack of clean water in 2025.” City residents spend US$11 a month on kerosene to boil water, while contentious water privatisation remains tangled in courts, first ruled illegal, “negligent in fulfilling the human right to water,” later overturned on a technicality.

Application: By recapturing stormwater, Jakarta affordably saves water, energy and carbon, creates cleaner waterways, and benefits ecosystems and social amenities.

7. Design urban spaces to reduce flood risks

Lima

Challenge: Home to one in three Peruvians, annually swelled by 150,000 migrants, its outskirts leave 1 million  people without connections. The city depends on distant streams–the Rio Rímac, Chillón and Lurín–fed by Andean glaciers four kilometres above sea level. The physical distance between supply and demand leaves Lima residents blissfully unaware that
absolute scarcity looms in eight years. A recent study, Culture of Water found people do not fear thirst, pollution or global warming.

Application: This is no mismatch. Earth’s biggest desert city, after Cairo, lacks a big river. Yet in March 2017 even Lima suffered from lethal downpours that flooded outlying neighbourhoods. By designing integrated drainage the city can slow surges, sink runoff, and release rain to recover from drought or deluge.

8. Enhance liveability with visible water

Madrid

Challenge: Spain may be Europe’s driest country, and its high elevation capital is the nation’s thirstiest. Hard infrastructure–1,300 dams, 700 desalination plants–offers less relief in the 21st Century, as urban life wilts under contested water rights, rising demand, growth, high evaporation rates, and the “Africanisation” of the Spanish climate.

Application: Madrid can retain water infused in roadside green infrastructure, shaded sidewalks, vegetated multi-purpose buffers, and blue-green recreation corridors to improve public space, boost development and mitigate the heat island effect.

9. Modify and adapt urban materials to minimise environmental impact

Mexico City

Challenge: Mexico City rose from the ancient Aztec capital, built on a lake. Today 22 million residents suffer a water delivery system that leaks 40 percent yet still drains the aquifer beneath their feet. As the ground has sunk 40 feet over 50 years, tilting churches and buildings, government ads warn the city may soon run out of water. With one water truck delivery service per 2,000 people, many grow more frustrated, threatening “mini-revolutions.”

Application: Carefully selected roofs, walls, surfaces, roads, and urban furniture can prevent the release of pollutants when exposed to sun and rain. While capitalntensive, rainfall capture and storage could secure 10-30 percent of Mexico City’s needs.

10. plan to secure water resources and mitigate drought

Moscow

Challenge: While Russia holds a fifth of the earth’s freshwater reserves, pristine Lake Baikal lies 4,300 kilometres away and over mountains from these 13 million people. Vladamir Putin has warned that Russia “prodigally and inefficiently uses its national wealth–freshwater.”
Groundwater tables have plunged 90 metres from exploitation; water quality poses worse risks. Factories withdraw 60 percent of water, but Soviet-era treatment plants deteriorate faster than they can be upgraded, repaired or replaced. As a result, only 1 percent of urban  water meets high standards; the rest requires further cleaning.

Application: Moscow’s water tanks are exhausted, in what Russian scientists call “the only big city in the world without a reliable water source.” But the city can share the water resource in proportion to users who contribute to the basin’s economy.

11. protect the quality of water resources

New Delhi

Challenge: Water provision is a daily struggle for 25 million people, and the collision of heat, thirst, and crowds make matters worse. Last year protestors sabotaged Munak canal,
which diverts northern rivers to meet the water demands of 55 percent of India’s megacity; weeks of shortages exacerbated the already anemic pressure, unreliable taps, chronic leaks, and declining production from water treatment plants like Wazirabad and Chandrawal. One  in four affluent landowners rely on secure, private wells, but fights escalate among the millions who fight over water tankers, or the one in five forced to drink fetid water.

Application: By securing tanks, upstream catchments, wetlands and aquifers, Delhi can provide high quality drinking water with minimal treatment and energy inputs.

12. Prepare for extreme events

Nicosia

Challenge: Cyprus’ capital inherited aging British and Ottoman water systems but recent decades brought new extremes. Reservoirs plunged, pipes burst, leaks spread, groundwater and desalination fell short of demand, rations were imposed, and households were fined. Then, just after half the city was left without water, flash floods ravaged it.

Application: Nicosia can absorb and minimise both kinds of radical flux, drought and deluge, if it invests in warning systems, riparian flow regimes, and basin vegetation.

13. Empower citizens for water

Sana’a

Challenge: In Yemen’s capital, the World Bank reports that less than half of the 2.2 million inhabitants receive piped water, the rest pay 5-10 times as much for water from tankers, and 60 percent is lost through leaks. The city’s rising population, shrinking rainfall, escalating tensions and falling groundwater tables converge against a backdrop of war. Peace would only increase irrigation of the narcotic qat, which sucks 40 percent from urban basins. As the
city is two kilometres above the coastline, desalination is out of reach.

Application: When the city fully grasps both the scarcity risks and opportunities (resource recovery, reduced dependency on uncertain future resources), it can drive urban planning, adapt behaviour, pay for services, and hold officials accountable.

14. Make professionals aware of water co-benefts

San Diego

Challenge: The warm, arid climate of the United States’ eighth-largest city attracts millions from far and wide; it must also import water from equally long distances in Northern California and the remote Colorado River. To offset low aquifer levels, erratic precipitation and an imbalance of supply and demand it must increase residential water rates, in part to pay for a massive desalination plant.

Application: By working across urban sectors, the city’s “Think Blue” programme may educate and engage people in synergies to design green infrastructure–collecting rainwater, effluent reuse, recycled nutrients, vegetated swales, landscape buffers, catch basins–that help capture and market the value of what little rain may fall.

15. Enhance transdisciplinary plans & operations teams

São Paulo

Challenge: Brazil holds 12 percent of the world’s fresh water, yet paulistanos face “hydraulic collapse.” Water rationing and pressure reduction recovered 22 percent, yet vital reservoirs have fallen below 15 percent, leaving six months of water in the system. Civil society groups complain that municipal, state and federal officials haven’t been aggressive enough, given the severity of the problem, though authorities have offered discounts on water bills for voluntary reductions in consumption.

16. Enable water-wise action

Tehran

Challenge: As Iran’s capital swelled to 14 million people, it stressed existing supplies, 60 percent of which came from dams on the Lar, Jajrood, Karaj and Latyan Rivers, and 40 percent from groundwater. The city suffered a sharp fall in water security, with depleted sources, reduced pressure, enforced rationing, and safety issues over quality. If current stress trends continue, Iran Energy Minister Hamid Chitchian warned: “The water-security problem is very serious in Tehran and needs to be addressed immediately.”

17. leaders engage and engender trust

Ulaanbaatar

Challenge: Despite its pristine image, growth potential and natural resource wealth, Mongolia’s capital faces a severe crisis in water quality and scarcity, according to an Asian Development Bank report. The city holds half of the country’s population but its groundwater has been overexploited by urban and rural pumping for industrial and mining interests. Residents on the outskirts, lack connections and must buy pricey water from kiosks or fill buckets from a diminished Tuul River, which has been polluted by the disposal of untreated raw sewage.

Application: By integrating water in city planning, the city can link multiple sources with urban parks, roads, energy and waste  so that efficiencies and synergies arise from a
more coordinated approach.

The post How to make your city water-wise appeared first on The Source.

In 2015, I joined the International Water Association (IWA) through the IWA Connect platform. Prior to that, I had come across the organization while researching for my final year thesis in university. I was convinced to join the association, not because I knew the benefits it had in store for me, but because there was a promotion to receive two editions of ‘The Source’ magazine if you joined before a particular date. For a while, I was dormant and hardly contributed.

A year down the line, I was still clueless about the association I had joined, mainly because I was unaware of how it could impact my career. Then, I came across a call for abstracts for the International Young Water Professionals Conference 2017. I decided to give it a try. While waiting for the outcome of my submission, I visited the website and IWA Connect regularly to check for updates. In doing so, I began to understand the amazing opportunities this association had for its members and especially for young professionals. Then it dawned on me that if this association offers so much professional development to young professionals, why weren’t more people talking about it?

In the early part of 2017, I received a notification that my abstract was accepted for an oral presentation during a technical session at the conference in South Africa. My joy was short-lived when I realized I had to submit a full paper in a few months! This was because I had no clue how to write research papers, to the extent of summarizing my research work from 50 pages to 8 pages. The IWA came to the rescue. Webinars were organized to educate presenters on how to write papers, prepare PowerPoint presentations, and even how to present one’s work during the conference. That brought me so much relief, and equipped me with new knowledge and skills that made my presentation successful at the conference.

Before attending the conference, I made the effort to find out how a Young Water Professionals Chapter could be formed in Ghana. I was connected to Brenda Ampomah, an IWA Programme Officer in Ghana, who gathered a few of us to help develop the necessary documents for the creation of the chapter. Together with my colleagues, we were soon able to create the document and Kirsten De Vette, the IWA Capacity and Development Officer, also shared her thoughts and gave feedback on the work we had done so far. Today, Ghana is listed among the YWP chapters globally that have a formal agreement with the IWA.

At the conference, I met other IWA staff and members, and I could see their passion for providing the platform for young professionals to develop their careers while providing solutions in the water industry. I joined a group on IWA Connect ‘Creating Water-Wise Cities’ and met the group’s Programme Officer, Lisa Andrews, at the conference in South Africa. Since then, she has supported and guided me in new initiatives under the scope of the programme objectives.

Jacob Amengor and Lisa Andrews, at the IWA Young Water Professionals Conference 2017, in Cape Town, South Africa.

At the conference, I represented the Ghana Chapter at the Global Coordination for Young Water Professionals meeting, which led to my appointment to serve on the YWP Chapter Coordination Sub-Committee. The conference gave me the opportunity to join a great network of young water professionals and to be motivated by their many different aspirations and achievements. I also served as one of the rapporteurs of the conference and it was an experience worth recounting.

Attendees to the IWA Young Water Professionals Conference 2017, in Cape Town, South Africa

Today, I can confidently write an abstract and a full paper because of the training from IWA. The paper I presented at the conference has been submitted to IWA Publishing and is going through the process of publication. I now know how to put together a session within a conference, because IWA gave me the opportunity to be part of the organizers of the IWA session at the Young Water Leaders’ Summit during the Singapore International Water Week.

Through IWA, I now have a better understanding of how to effectively use social media tools in advancing my work in the water industry. At the end of a recent project, Emma Weisbord, IWA Governing Members and Young Water Professionals Officer, offered to help me understand how to communicate my work in an effective manner. She provided me with a set of tools that I could adopt and use easily. Today, even if IWA membership fees were doubled, I would still pay to be a member because I appreciate the personal development it has brought me. By now, I am sure you are convinced about how the IWA can help you reach your career goals without so much struggle.

I recommend that you join the IWA today and not to be dormant as I was in the first year of my membership. To help you be active and benefit fully from the activities of the Association, I advise you sign up on IWA Connect and all other IWA social media platforms. Join specialist groups and the YWP groups and look out for opportunities to take initiatives. You should connect with other IWA members and seek their guidance in your career. You can collaborate with other members to jointly work on a research, write a blog post or organize a session. Lastly, join your IWA YWP country chapter to get involve in their activities. I invite you to join me and the IWA today on your water-wise journey!

The post How the IWA deepened my perspective of the water industry appeared first on The Source.

It started in 2014, when the International Water Association (IWA) assessed fifteen countries and identified a “staggering” skills gap and labour shortage in the water and sanitation sector. The Philippines requires 86,000 more technical field personnel. Mozambique needs another 11,900. In Ghana, 98 percent of the shortfall was in the sanitation sector.

That first-of-its-kind report, An Avoidable Crisis called for “concerted action to strengthen the evidence base” on which to build action plans and “strategies that have high-level political buy-in from multiple actors to ensure sustained, adequate professional and technical capacity.”

In November 2017, the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation answered the call by launching another first-of-its-kind response: a new Masters of Science Programme in Sanitation.

Mariska Ronteltap announced the new degree and diploma at the IWA Development Congress in Buenos Aires, in November 2017. “The MSc programme seeks to meet demand in the sector for overall sanitation experts with allaround capacity,” said Ronteltap, a lecturer on sanitary engineering at UNESCO-IHE, who helped design it.

“There’s been growing demand for more professionals, and this collaboration draws on considerable experience from all levels,” she said.

More than 100 top sanitation experts designed the rigorous curricula to be completed in twelve months, with an emphasis on problem-solving, field experience, and application of active learning methods. To ensure hands-on learning, the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education constructed a state-of-the-art faecal sludge laboratory.

The 12 months are broken into clearly defined weeks that immerse students in relevant topics. Focal areas go beyond the expected fields of sanitation technology, public health, finances and project management, to ensure students fully grasp the critically important social sciences, group dynamics, and behavioural change.

Initially, scholarships will be made available to attract fifteen talented, ambitious, young students to the Netherlands. But the long-term aim is to scale and replicate the programme to be made available at universities throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The programme encourages applicants from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and women, irrespective of their geographical location.

Preparations have been thorough. Curriculum design appears rigorous and demanding. The resulting diploma should become a unique point of pride. But perhaps the strongest signal of future status for earning an MSc in Sanitation is how it now seems unthinkable that the world could have gone this long without it.

The post New masters programme launched for sanitation professionals appeared first on The Source.

The Forum addressed one of the region’s most ecologically complex and politically sensitive issues, and elevated groundwater on the foreign policy front, leaving India and its neighbours open to multilateral engagements.

“All who came, did so with an open mind to engage and learn from each other,” said Sushmita Mandal, IWA’s India Programme Manager and one of the report’s editors. “It was an opportunity that made the issue of groundwater visible. The timing was critical, as the region was reeling under the impacts of drought, poor monsoons, and improper management of available resources in the summer of 2016.”

How reliant is South Asia? Consider that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh together pump almost half of the world’s groundwater used for irrigation. Groundwater supports the livelihoods of 60-80 percent of the population, and has, as during the Green Revolution, helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

Yet groundwater has also been undervalued and overexploited. Excessive, intensive, and unregulated use has resulted in dry wells and declining water tables. Depletion itself can be fixed. But related land subsidence, saline intrusion, or contamination from arsenic, fluoride, sewage, effluent and chemicals may be too costly or impossible to reverse.

The 100-page synthesis is comprehensive, but more valuable than its words are the unique process and diverse people who spoke them. In a thirsty region often known for quarrelling over shared water resources and transboundary basins, the gathering was marked by mutual respect and active engagement.

The Forum provided the first transnational meeting of its kind, a platform to address groundwater management and governance. By generating broad consensus that there is scope to engage, interact and learn from each other, the new report provides a stable foundation for the next.

The post IWA and World Bank launch innovative groundwater report appeared first on The Source.

The Saemul Park plant has been constructed underground to ensure greater acceptability with local communities, and allows the surface area above it to be used as a park. The award-winning part of the plant all happens underground. Innovative technologies have allowed the treatment plant to become energy self-sufficient through the production of biogas, while simultaneously recovering water and other valuable resources. The plant has significantly reduced its carbon footprint by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and introduced a ‘Positive Impact Development’ tool to monitor the overall achievement.

“Anyang Saemul Park sewage treatment plant realises three types of resource recovery: water, energy and the climate,” said Kwak Donggeun of POSCO Engineering and Construction, upon receiving the award. “The plant is special because it also includes small water cycle balance for climate recovery through a decentralised rainwater management system. It’s an example of how a sewage treatment plant can be transformed from one where energy is consumed and water lost, to the one that produces energy and collects water as a resource.”

Recovering water and other vital resources like biogas, metals, phosphates and bioplastics from wastewater are critical to deliver a sustainable water sector. The 2017 Award, in partnership with the international knowledge network, WaterShare, is for a proven technology on resource recovery, applied at full or demonstrative scale, which serves as an excellent example for the water sector.

“This award is based on two sets of evaluations, one by academics, the other by practitioners,” said Professor Willy Verstraete, chairman of the judging panel. “A winning solution must be scientifically sound but also able to be scaled up in the real world. That is quite a challenge and, for the successful winner, a great achievement.”

The winning entry receives the award because it represents the best example of a large-scale, economically feasible, and impactful project that uses resources from the water cycle and transfers scientific knowledge.

“By mutually sharing and learning from the experiences of different areas as well as from colleagues from other regions, performance improvement and creative application of innovative solutions will be possible,” said Kees Roest of WaterShare.

The post IWA announce winner of resource recovery from water award appeared first on The Source.

The Memorandum of Understanding will link IWA’s 17 Principles for Water-Wise Cities’ to improve water management and work towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals with C40s global network of cities. It will address the mitigation potential of urban water management by looking at water efficiency, energy efficiency, nutrients capture and energy recovery as opportunities to drive down emissions from the urban water management sector.

“IWA has been promoting the Principles for Water-Wise Cities over the past 12 months, with a number of cities and water professionals endorsing them,” Tom Williams, Programmes Director, IWA, told The Source. “We want to bring together this respective momentum around urban water and connect the problem owners with the solution providers.”

Williams added that more and more water professionals, and therefore IWA, are looking towards new partnerships, individuals and organisations which are not conventional water partners.

Figures released by C40 and IWA show that seven percent of global energy is used to supply water, with water losses as high as 70 percent due to ageing infrastructure and extreme events disruptions, and 80 percent of all wastewater is released untreated.

Sustainable water and wastewater management are central to cities securing a low-carbon, resilient future. Reducing water loss, reusing wastewater and replenishing water bodies are three examples of how cities can improve water management, contribute to reducing their GHG emissions, and adapt to climate change impacts.

“We see that water pattern disruption is often the first sign of serious climate impacts and 70 percent of our member cities tell us that they are already seeing the significant and negative impacts of climate change,” said Mark Watts, Executive Director, C40. “Sixty-four percent of our member cities face significant risk from surface and flash floods.”

Ricardo Cepeda-Márquez, Head of Solid Waste Initiative, C40, told The Source that C40 and IWA aim to launch two new networks on urban water management and wastewater treatment and a technical assistance programme building on C40 political leadership and decision-makers engagement and IWA’s technical leadership.

“We believe that the Water-Wise Principles are a great framework,” he said. “Each city will have different powers, priorities and opportunities to implement them, and C40 and IWA intend to support their local priorities to facilitate faster and larger-scale implementation in collaboration with other cities participating in the networks.”

The post New partnership to link water priorities with cities appeared first on The Source.

Arup will work with IWA on the Water-Wise Cities Initiative, which draws together urban and water professionals to integrate water management in city planning and design through its 17 principles that include liveability, sustainability and efficiency.

“This is the first key strategic partnership that supports the IWA Water-Wise Cities Initiative,” said Corinne Trommsdorff, IWA Cities of the Future Programme Manager.

Speaking at the Embrace the Water: a Cities of the Future Conference in Gothenburg, in June, Trommsdorff said the partnership will enable IWA to reach and engage more city leaders towards impact-oriented actions to improve urban water as part of urban development.

“IWA is about using the power of the network to inspire and catalyse change,” she added. “Arup is a champion of water-wise cities, supporting the IWA network instigating champions among urban leaders and professionals.”

Key areas of collaboration include increasing the knowledge available to city leaders to help them become ‘water-wise cities’ and empowering young water professionals to play a role.

“We need to think and act wisely to find ways to do more with less, while ensuring that cities are resilient to floods, droughts and the challenges of growing water scarcity,” said Mark Fletcher, Global Water Leader, Arup. “Through our partnership with IWA we can help civic leaders ensure that cities continue to have access to safe water and sanitation, putting water at the forefront of all future design and development.”
As you can see this is how playing poker online works if you are playing poker in a poker room such as this Americas Cardroom or http://www.americascardroom.org/americascardroom.com
Dozens of cities, urban organisations and individual urban professionals have endorsed the IWA Principles for Water-Wise Cities, recognising the importance of water for cities of the future.

The post Arup and IWA to accelerate transition towards water-wise cities appeared first on The Source.

“We must find ways to merge managing the risk of water and embracing it as an asset, making sure that what we are left with are solutions that increase people’s quality of life in cities,” said Søholt. “People are attracted to water. We have positive associations with the sound and blue colour of water, all linked to our needs as humans. So naturally we see waterfront destinations come up all over the world and people congregating at these placed to enjoy the sound and activities surrounding water.”

Gehl are focused on building cities for people and making sure all their work benefits those that live, work and move around cities today. Integrated design solutions have been identified as one of the biggest challenges facing city authorities in getting people across different silos to work together.

One of Søholt’s key points was that there is a common denominator with all of the risks we are facing; people and their behavioural change, which need to be addressed in all the solutions that are being formulated.

When the city of Gothenburg were formulating its strategy a team was gathered across all the various departments to sit together in the same space in the harbour to come up with new solutions.

“It is unfortunately very seldom that I see this kind of totally integrated solution making and creative design leadership in cities around the world,” explained Søholt. “So we have to overcome this way of silo planning and move away from reactive governance where we think of planning as a linear process and move towards a much more proactive facilitative leadership model where the cities are actually engaging all the stakeholders to come up with not just good projects but with shared value. Something that we can see we are all benefitting from.”

The city of Copenhagen was highlighted as a leading example after the designing of a climate neighbourhood in the northern part of the city, where they have engaged local citizens through a local office where people can be involved in the design of plazas and streets.

Authorities have also recently created a green city strategy for the whole of Copenhagen. One of the elements in this strategy is planting 1,000 new trees in the city, where the citizens were asked to vote for the streets in most need of greening and climate adaptation design.

The post Embracing water as an asset appeared first on The Source.