Why water?

My friend and co-founder of Kando , Ari Goldfarb , tends to start every meeting with new people by asking the question 'why water?' A relevant question that often yields very diverse answers; from 'snow is only frozen water', 'because I love sailing', to 'because every drop counts.'

After working almost two years at Aliaxis and as responsible in Aliaxis Next for building solutions for a more resilient water infrastructure in the world, my take on the question is as follows:

Because access to this essential resource, which we most often take for granted, is under immense pressure, hidden in the shadow of other challenges to mankind such as climate change, energy crisis, outbreaks of war and pandemics.

It is a common fact that ~70% of all freshwater in the world is used for agriculture. Luckily, there have been some significant water productivity improvements within the agriculture sector as well as in the industrial domain. But even if those improvements are sustained through 2023, it would only address 20% of the supply-demand gap of water in the world. Because the scary fact is, that the aggregated global gap between need and access to reliable supply of water in 2030 is ~40%, equivalent to 1.08 billion International Olympic Committee – IOC sized swimming pools. Or 1,346 laps around the earth, if you laid the swimming pools next to each other.

That is a lot.

The report 'Charting Our Water Future - Economic frameworks to inform decision-making', although published already back in 2009 by 2030 Water Resources Group , still provides great insight into the complexity of the challenges we are facing.

A tricky thing is, that access to clean water and the need for water in various industries varies throughout the globe. Even within countries, you have regions with water abundance, while others are battling water scarcity. Take India as an example: Here, the upcoming water battle will be driven primarily by a demand for water in agriculture production. In China, increased industrialization and domestic urbanization are two of the biggest drivers for water scarcity.

So, what could we do? Adapting a classical economic approach, we could either increase the supply of water or increase our efficiency when we use the scarce resource. But the report also outlines a third alternative that might be more radical: to reduce the demand for water by changing a country or region's water-using activities (for instance, decrease the amount of thermal power production in the energy mix, decrease agriculture production, or industrial usage).

When searching for new solutions to make the world future-proof in terms of access to water, an often neglected component needs to be put into play: the marginal cost of adding the supply. In my team, we have often debated desalination. Being a power-hungry solution that also produces a saline residual, desalination can be a great way of increasing water supply. However, few other solutions have a higher marginal cost. The same is valid for many other solutions, including municipal leak detection (although a leaking water infrastructure also challenges the water utility’s ability to make a profit that can be reinvested in the network, and that every liter of water wasted in the network is directly linked to the release of greenhouse gases).

I personally believe that this devilish but important detail is often forgotten when we discuss how to solve water problems: there is not a single solution that fixes all the problems; there is not even a set of 'best case' solutions that we can apply broadly, since our approach needs to take into account the country- or region-specific context and characteristics.

For a passionate innovator like me and my team at Aliaxis, who embraces the complexity of the messy everyday life and acknowledges the power of collaboration and partnerships, this is exciting.

And being aware of the power of the human mind, the convergence of bright ideas, great teamwork, access to funding, entrepreneurial spirit, and political focus, I insist on believing that the future looks bright.

Why water? 

#SDG6 #Innovation #Water_Infrastructure #Business_Development #Entreprenurship