Don't take water for granted

It's time we started managing water as the precious resource that it is
Foong Sew Bun, Business Times 28 Jul 09;

WATER flows through everything - the air, the land, our bodies and the global economy.

In fact, every time a thing or a service is bought or sold, there is a virtual exchange of water. It takes 700 gallons of water to make a cotton T-shirt, 2,000 gallons of water to make one gallon of milk and 39,000 gallons of water to make a car.

We use water to process raw materials, manufacture products, generate electricity and transport people and goods. We desalinate water to build cities in the desert. Is it any wonder then that in the last 100 years, global water usage has increased at twice the rate of population growth?

In Singapore, the shortage of water is no secret. The second Singapore International Water Week in June attracted over 10,000 attendees from more than 85 countries and saw S$2.2 billion worth of ideas signed.

Today, Singapore's NEWater - high-grade reclaimed water which has passed more than 30,000 tests for purity and safety - meets 15 per cent of the country's total water needs. With the opening of a new water plant in 2010, NEWater will meet 30 per cent of Singapore's total water demand by 2010.

Every time we interact with water, we change its direction, chemistry, usefulness or availability. Because of this daunting complexity, water is poorly understood and often mismanaged. For example, global agriculture wastes an estimated 60 per cent of the 2,500 trillion litres it uses each year. Municipalities lose as much as 50 per cent of their water supply through leaky infrastructure.

Amid this inefficiency, one in five people still lacks access to clean, safe drinking water, and the United Nations predicts that nearly half the world's population will experience critical water shortages by the year 2080.

But we can do better. Today's technology can monitor, measure and analyse entire water ecosystems, from rivers and reservoirs to the pumps and pipes in our homes. We can give all the organisations, businesses, communities and nations dependent on a continuing supply of freshwater - that is, all of us - a single, reliable, up-to-the-minute and actionable view of water use.

Already, we are using sophisticated sensor networks to collect and analyse the tremendous amounts of data generated in complex water systems. In the United States, a data platform is being created to support instrumentation of the entire length of the 500km Hudson River for a real-time view of a river system that supplies both industry and individuals.

In the Netherlands, smarter levees are built to monitor changing flood conditions and respond accordingly. And sensors are revolutionising agriculture, and providing detailed information on air quality, soil moisture content and temperature to calculate optimal irrigation schedules.

Smart metering can give individuals and businesses timely insight into their own water use, raising awareness, locating inefficiencies and decreasing demand.

Finally, we can apply advanced computing and analytics to move beyond 'real time' to prediction, supporting better-informed policy and management decisions. A collaborative research initiative with the Marine Institute in Ireland aims to turn Galway Bay into a living laboratory - instrumenting the bay to gather data on water temperature, currents, wave strength, salinity and marine life, and applying algorithms that can forecast everything from wave patterns over 24 hours to the right time to harvest mussels.

The flow of clean, plentiful water is as essential to our economy and society as it is to our planet. Let's stop taking it for granted and start managing it as the precious resource that it is.

The writer is IBM distinguished engineer, chief technology officer, IBM Singapore