Leveraging the power of ICTs for Innovative Water Management

Despite the progress made since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goal on ensuring sustainable management of water and sanitation for all, significant challenges remain. Eleven percent of the world population still lack access to clean drinking water and countries have reported only an average implementation of integrated water resources management as per SDG 6.

On 13 May 2019, as part of the International Water Conference, UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector organized a multi-stakeholder panel on “Water and Technological Innovation” with representatives from government, private sector, academia and international organizations from different regions of the world.  The session highlighted how technological innovations can help leapfrog in simplifying the value chain of water resources at both demand- and supply-side and advocated the use of cutting edge technologies - such as IOT and AI -  to improve existing understanding of the water cycle.

Dr. Moez Chakchouk, Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, UNESCO chaired the session and highlighted the activities that UNESCO supports to promote the use of technology to engage people in sustainable water management through its programs in citizen science. For instance, Mr.  A.R. Shivkumar from Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology, India teamed with UNESCO to launch an app on Rainwater Harvesting.  The application is now helping thousands of households that rely on rainwater to meet all of their domestic freshwater needs.

H.E. Mr. Erik Grigoryan, Minister of Nature Protection, Armenia shared Armenia’s experience with water management and pointed out that data and technology are crucial for water resource management. He underlined six key factors that are necessary for effective water resource management. These include: i) political, ii) legislative and institutional backing for sustainable resource management, iii) effective monitoring, iv) accurate data for better planning, v) avoiding water scarcity through integrated water management and vi) efficient decision making at all levels by involving all stakeholders.

Mr. Bernard de Potter, Director-General, Flanders Environment Agency discussed the changing nature of water management where old systems designed to channelize water through straight canals into the sea are now inadequate due to unpredictable weather in Belgium. He presented the multilayered ICT system developed by Flanders Environment Agency to address the current water challenges. These layers include: i) real time monitoring, ii) robust communication systems and protocols for interoperability of data, iii) Use of big data and AI focused on open standards (Oslo Protocol) for understanding water management better, iv) Models to analyze the collected data and v) provide succinct analysis to citizens and policy makers through smart phones or other accessible platforms. As a result of this information available to people, farmers are using the data to manage water use on farms and entrepreneurs are optimizing their cooling systems based on local water cycles.

Mr. Bong-jae Kim, Executive Vice President, K-Water talked about the importance of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) for water resources management, more specifically, SWM for water supply & treatment as a solution for the current water issues. He highlighted that facilities managed by K-water collect climate, hydrological and monitoring information in real-time that feeds into the hydro-intelligent toolkit called “K-HIT”, which is a series of IWRM systems that cover the entire water cycle. K-Water applies ICTs to water supply and treatment systems to realize reliable water quality with safe resource management and healthy water production. There technology is able to obtain positive outcomes by increasing the drinking rate, reducing the leakage rate, and increasing the revenue collected from the water tariff.

Prof. Pradeep Mujumdar, Professor, Indian Institute of Science explained how they have enabled the downscaling of climate models to local scale, thereby permitting accurate modelling of local hydrological cycles for improved response to urban water scenarios. He discussed different types of downscaling methodologies including statistical downscaling that uses machine learning to generate local hydrological models. These methods have proved to be effective in urban floods management and have are being used in several cities including Mumbai, Bangalore and Berlin to model changing patterns of rainfall with urbanization. They have also implemented IoT-Based management of Urban Water Distribution system in Bangalore by integrating data from sensors, Satellites, ICTs and AI tools.

Mr Imre Takacs, CEO, Dynamita underlined several applications of wastewater including recycled products like fertilizers, cleaners, biopolymers. He discussed how wastewater is being reused to recharge water to prevent subsidence of land and to generate energy from waste. He highlighted the importance of increased citizens’ awareness in water conservation through simple messages like using less water for showering.

Prof Wouter Butayart, Professor, Imperial College London focused his intervention on polycentric governance of water resources. He highlighted the need for a more participatory and inclusive governance of water resources relying on distribution of responsibilities, multiple sources of information, and co-generation of knowledge. He discussed the role of citizens as not only end users of water services but also in generating knowledge through citizen science programs where they help scientists in data collection and monitoring. He however cautioned that citizen science should be responsible and transparent.

The participants raised several questions regarding sustainable financing of water management projects, methods for involving citizens whether for awareness campaigns or to crowdsource data and the possibility of data sharing with regard to water resources through an online platform to facilitate exchange between scientific communities in different regions. The panelists highlighted that UNESCO and along with other UN agencies have an important role to play in strengthening open science and open data movements across the world for better information sharing and interoperability. Dr. Moez Chakchouk reaffirmed UNESCO’s commitment to using ICTs for furthering science through its work in open science and open data. He also stressed the importance of capacity building through several UNESCO initiatives in developing countries and how they are having a sustainable impact in the communities that people trained serve. For instance, the Monsoon School jointly organized by UNESCO and IISc, Bangalore to has trained over 300 individuals from developing countries in South Asia in the past six years.