The Dynamics of Water Innovation A Guide to Water Technology Commercialization

By Water Environment Federation

The Dynamics of Water Innovation is an invaluable resource for individuals and organizations driving the adoption of new technologies in the water sector, including entrepreneurs, investors, technology and innovation leaders, researchers, and academics. The global water crisis means there is an urgent need for the development, introduction, and scaling of water technologies all around the world. Historically the water sector has been perceived as slow to adopt innovation, but little research has been carried out to verify or explain this phenomenon. This book proposes a new water technology adoption (WaTA) model created for the unique circumstances of water sector innovation and drawn from existing cross-sector models. The WaTA model includes a practical set of criteria that can be applied in the real world to generate better-informed planning and decision-making for innovators and investors. It gives water innovators a practical and robust method to plan and track developments, which could have a significant impact on perceptions of the pace of change, market confidence, and future outcomes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Water Environment Federation
• Release date: Jun 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9781572784536

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Water Challenges Facing the World

1.0GLOBAL WATER CHALLENGES USHER IN A NEW ERA OF WATER INNOVATION

1.1Water Scarcity

1.2Water Manageability

1.3Water Accessibility

1.4Water Quality

2.0AN URGENT NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE DYNAMICS OF WATER INNOVATION

3.0REFERENCES

Abstract: Global water-related challenges are numerous and continually evolving. They include water scarcity, wastewater pollution, chemical contaminants in the water environment, aging infrastructure, demographic changes, and over-abstraction of resources. The global water crisis has many dimensions to it but can broadly be thought of in terms of (a) scarcity, (b) manageability, (c) accessibility, and (d) quality. There is an urgent need to develop innovative solutions to address this global water crisis—it represents an economic opportunity to create value at a global scale. The urgency of the challenges presented by too little water, too much water, and deteriorating water quality in the face of climate change, urbanization, and aging infrastructure is not currently reflected in the speed of adoption of innovation.

1.0 GLOBAL WATER CHALLENGES USHER IN A NEW ERA OF WATER INNOVATION

If necessity is the mother of invention, then by extension, a lack of necessity stifles innovation and invention. The last major era of water systems innovation, which gave us the ability to produce safe potable drinking water and sanitation in the latter half of the 19th century and early 20th century, was driven by necessity—the necessity to prevent deaths from disease. The importance of water disinfection and the provision of sanitation are comparable to the discovery of vaccines and antibiotics as key factors that have increased human longevity. For proof, simply look at the high mortality rates in regions of the world that lack these necessities.

Having created a water system that, by and large, worked, we then rested on our laurels for almost 100 years. In terms of water management systems, we have been swimming in the same direction for more than 100 years. We built the water system that supports our society on the basis that renewable freshwater is freely available and is manageable and predictable. Yet the world has changed enormously in the past 100 years. There was no way these developments could have been anticipated when we began building these systems. Layered on top of this, climate change represents an existential threat to both water availability and manageability.

Water thought leader Dr. Glen Daigger poses a somewhat rhetorical question as to whether a system that evolved from a world of 2.5 billion people, mostly rural and lacking in modern technology, would be suitable and fit for purpose for a world of 9 billion people, mostly urban and experiencing energy and resource constraints (Daigger, 2009; Daigger et al., 2019).

The current water system evolved, piecemeal, bit by bit, gradually over time, an example of evolution, not intelligent design. We take freshwater from nature, produce one type of water, potable water, and then distribute it in networks where we lose anywhere from 20% to 40% before it ever reaches a home (Carrington, 2017; Irish Water, 2019). We then use it for everything, adding in detergents, fire retardants, nano-plastics, urine, feces, and food wastes. Then we send it all into a sewer system to a centralized treatment facility, where we try but fail to take everything we added back out again (i.e., the nutrients and the organics). And when that is done, we generally don’t reuse it; we discharge it.

An analogy can be drawn with the example told by American evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould (2010) of a green sea turtle that makes a 4000 kilometer round trip each year from the coast of Brazil to lay its eggs in the Azorean islands, which are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. When the turtle initially started this journey hundreds of thousands of years ago, the Azorean islands were much closer to the coast of Brazil. Over time, the tectonic plates gradually moved Brazil and the Azorean islands further apart, and each year, the green turtle continued to make this journey without noticing the gradual increase in distance.

We have seen more changes in the time span since we built those first water systems than we saw in the previous one thousand years. This is referred to as The Great Acceleration (Steffen et al., 2015). We have not had time to adapt to these changes. The question is whether we will keep trying to swim in the same direction or stand back, reevaluate, and develop a more fit-for-purpose system for the 21st century.

In the current system, as long as there was readily accessible freshwater, there was no pressing need to change. In other words, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. To date, we have, for the most part, enjoyed access to safe drinking water and sanitation in the Western world. However, in many cities, states, and regions of the world, because of mounting global pressures—including population increases, urbanization, climate change, rising energy costs, and the need for water to provide energy—we can no longer afford an inefficient and wasteful system. This is driving real change in how we manage water and is creating opportunities for technology development. We are facing a climate crisis and a global water crisis, and its many dimensions described here are ushering in a new era of water innovation. How to manage this innovation to ensure efficient use of capital to create value in solving global water challenges is the subject of this book.

The water challenges facing the world are accelerating and relate to both the security of supply and the quality of water. Recognizing the growing challenge of water scarcity, the United Nations General Assembly launched the Water Action Decade on March 22, 2018, to mobilize a transformation in the way we manage water. The anticipated 40% shortfall in freshwater resources by 2030, along with population growth, was given as an indicator of the worsening global water crisis (United Nations, 2018b).

Global water-related challenges are numerous and continually evolving. They include water scarcity, sewage pollution, chemical contaminants in the water environment, aging infrastructure, demographic change, and over-abstraction of resources. The effects of anthropogenic climate change as a result of global warming will be felt primarily through water and include disrupted weather patterns leading to extreme events such as flood and drought. Impacts will be felt through unpredictable water availability, heightened scarcity, and contaminated supplies, all drastically affecting the quantity and quality of the water people need to survive.

The global water crisis has many dimensions to it but can broadly be thought of in terms of scarcity, manageability, accessibility, and quality.

1.1 Water Scarcity

In absolute terms, there is no shortage of water globally. We are, however, running out of locally available, renewable freshwater. This is exacerbated by population growth, economic growth, climate change, and urbanization.

Today, approximately 10% of the precipitation that falls on land is intercepted by humanity and used to grow food, power cities, or provide drinking water (Andersen, 2020; Sedlak, 2024). Expressed like this, it does not sound like very much and is a reminder that while water is perceived as a global issue, it is really a hyper-local issue that has to be dealt with within the theater of the water catchment, city by city, town by town. While much of the precipitation falls in sparsely populated areas, in drier, more populated areas, over half the water that falls on land is used by people. This is linked to the fact that water abstraction from nature to meet human needs is now 10 times greater than it was in 1900. It has increased because of the increase in land under irrigation, population growth, and economic growth. Domestic and industrial water use increases as GDP increases and average incomes increase, but data from the World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct platform show that domestic water demand grew 600% from 1960 to 2014, a significantly faster rate than any other sector (Otto & Schleifer, 2020; Wada, 2016). This is compounded by the fact that in certain parts of the world, water abstraction relies on the pumping of nonrenewable water sources such as fossil groundwater, laid down over thousands of years. In other places, it relies on rivers fed from meltwater from glaciers that may be shrinking or disappearing. Erratic rainfall patterns, long-term droughts and climatic shifts all point toward this supply-demand gap.

We know from United Nations data that by 2025 half of the world’s population could be living in areas facing water scarcity, and forecasts indicate that some 700 million people could be displaced by intense water scarcity by 2030 (United Nations Children’s Fund [UNICEF], 2020; United Nations, 2018a; United Nations, 2020b). As water scarcity increases, water becomes an ever-more-precious resource. This makes new types of innovations in areas such as lower energy desalination, rainwater capture, water reuse, and atmospheric water capture more viable and necessary.

1.2 Water Manageability

Water in nature has a variable signal. Rivers ebb and flow naturally with the seasons. Much of the history of human water management has been trying to flatten that signal. The history of controlling waterways began, as Giulio Boccaletti (2021) tells us, when we stood still in a world of moving water. The era of large-scale water management accelerated in the early part of the 20th century. In 1900, there was not a single dam greater than 15 m in height. By 1950 there were 5,270, and by 1980, there were 36,562 (Davis, 2012). Our urban water systems relied on those upstream interventions to even out the flow, and our stormwater and sewage systems were designed to cope with all but the most extreme weather events. These systems were engineered based on historic weather patterns to be capable of dealing with the one-in-fifty-year or one-in-one-hundred-year extreme weather event. Climate change is, however, shattering the illusion that we have emancipated ourselves from nature. Extreme weather events are leading to flash floods and overwhelming existing collection system infrastructure that were never designed for these intense rainfall events. Thus, in the years ahead, managing too much water will be an equally challenging part of the water crisis as managing too little.

1.3 Water Accessibility

Access to water and sanitation is a fundamental human right embodied in the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). These global targets are designed as a blueprint to achieve a more sustainable future, and number 6 (SDG 6), which pledges to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all, spells out the enormous challenge we face (United Nations, 2020a).

The goals within SDG 6 include:

Provide access to safe and affordable drinking water for all;

Provide access to adequate sanitation and hygiene for all;

Improve water quality by reducing pollution and halving the proportion of untreated wastewater;

Increase water efficiency across all sectors and ensure sustainable withdrawals;

Introduce integrated water resources management (IWRM) at all levels, including through transboundary cooperation;

Protect and restore water-related ecosystems, including mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, aquifers, and lakes;

Expand international cooperation and build capacity in water and sanitation for low-income countries, including water-harvesting, desalination, water efficiency, wastewater treatment, recycling, and reuse technologies; and

Support and strengthen community participation in improving water and sanitation management.

However, while a number of countries are making headway in addressing some of these targets, the UN’s 2021 progress report showed that 29% of the world’s population (2.3 billion people) still lacks clean drinking water, while 46% (some 3.6 billion people) lacks sanitation. A further 3 billion lack basic handwashing facilities at home, a disturbing statistic in a world facing the prospect of endemic pandemic disease (United Nations, 2021).

The World Health Organization (WHO)/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JPM) for water supply, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) has provided the leading source data to track progress against UN SDG 6. The program reported that the percentage of the population with sewerage coverage in sub-Saharan African urban areas declined from 13% in 2000 to 11% in 2015 (WHO & UNICEF, 2017). The costs associated with a lack of access to water and sanitation place a burden on those who can least afford it (White & Damon, 2018).

Advancements in water technology can help address some of the challenges arising, and there is a role too for fresh thinking and different approaches. There are multiple opportunities for both system-level changes and incremental improvements within the existing paradigm, but there is often limited human and financial capital made available to develop and disseminate the solutions required.

Lack of access to water and sanitation is not an issue confined to lower-income countries, as evidenced by a report from the U.S. Water Alliance (2019), which stated that more than 2 million Americans do not have running water and sanitation, including over half-a-million homeless people. Linked to water accessibility is water affordability and how to provide water services for the world’s poorest people in an economically sustainable way. This requires innovations in technology, business models, and systems-level innovations that can all help to drive down the cost of providing water services.

1.4 Water Quality

We may have thought that we had largely solved water quality issues in the developed world when we developed ways to produce potable water that was safe to drink. However, this focused primarily on the removal, destruction, or inactivation of pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, and protozoa. These are things that make people ill immediately. The challenges we are increasingly facing regarding water quality relate to low levels of contaminants that can lead to chronic health effects over the longer term. This can be likened to the effect of smoking in the general population, where one cigarette may not lead to cancer, but smoking cigarettes over the long term will shorten your lifespan. Contaminants of concern include trihalomethanes, potentially carcinogenic disinfection byproducts produced when chlorine reacts with naturally occurring organic matter present in the water. Per and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), commonly known as forever chemicals also form a threat. For example, in the Netherlands, RIVM, the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, announced that Dutch drinking water produced from river water led to high personal PFAS intake (RIVM, 2022). Other contaminants of concern include toxic metals such as lead, which can be leached into water supplies that use older lead pipes. There are also a host of what are termed emerging contaminants, an umbrella term used to describe a wide range of compounds such as endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) and pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) (Diamanti-Kandarakis et al.,