Why do people have charged mobile phones even where there is no drinking water?

We don't have to watch programmes about children living in third world countries drinking from polluted puddles on TV to have a guilty conscience when we flush the toilet with drinking water. But even if we think that is not right, it is hard to imagine a parallel infrastructure for grey water being built at national level - even the implementation of individual solutions at home seems more realistic.

But there are already examples where lower quality water from multiple sources is treated separately from domestic tap water and sent through a separate network to be used, say, for cooling plants. The system in Singapore, a country facing water shortages for political reasons (frictions with neighbouring Malaysia), is still not a parallel population network, but it is an important step towards rationality - as Kala Vairavamoorthy, Executive Director of the International Water Association (IWA), revealed in a presentation at BME.

In the Singapore case, the diversification of water sources is emphasised. In addition to importing water and desalinating seawater, the city-state also operates rainwater reservoirs and recycles its own wastewater. This solution also shows that the whole water sector is changing around the world, with experts in many places thinking about how to make the system more circular, to extract value from the water that is used, the British professor explained.

Kala Vairavamoorthy said that a change of approach requires new ways of management and, of course, a high level of innovation and the active involvement of the younger generations, as we are under constant pressure: climate change, urbanisation, ageing networks and tightening regulation would all be major problems even by themselves. Meanwhile, water consumption in the Global South continues to rise.

This means we need to adapt quickly, rethinking the way we use and recycle water. This is all the more difficult because we are on an uncertain path: the evolution of emissions, the technology and the exact source of financing for investments is unknown, but the cost will certainly be significant.

Kala Vairavamoorthy and Hassan Charaf, BME rector

The expert also says that it is important to remember that reducing the amount of energy used, while certainly a welcome development, does not necessarily mean reducing emissions - and the responsible approach is to take into account the goal of reducing our overall carbon footprint when making decisions.

In the presentation it was mentioned that the technology for recycling wastewater is available, as the Singapore example shows, but the business models are not yet developed and the market is not mature enough to allow widespread uptake. A whole ecosystem would be needed, because individual actors do not have the knowledge to run the whole system. 

"It's worth learning from other sectors, including decentralisation, to have the flexibility and agility."

By decentralisation, he meant first and foremost that the future of water management lies in local, modular systems rather than in giant networks. He argued that if you go to a slum where there is no clean water or sewerage, people will still walk around with their mobile phones charged, because they can get electricity from alternative sources - but they cannot yet build their own sewerage network. The aim would be to have clean water where the public network does not reach.

Even artificial intelligence can help us to do this, if the available data on water networks are interpreted correctly, as 85 percent of this data pool is currently unused. Kala Vairavamoorthy concluded by saying that there are currently three ways forward: business as usual; spending more on our existing, inefficient systems; and a paradigm shift that will bring about a real change.

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