All aspects of the water sector concerned by innovation
Whether their origin is public or private, global studies on water all point to the same conclusion: the gap between water supply and demand is widening and could reach 40% by 2050. Meanwhile, certain projections estimate that 70% of the population will be living in urban areas by this same date. This increasingly restricts the chances of meeting goal 6 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (“Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all by 2030”).
In this context,innovation has a crucial role to play. It is part of the 4th industrial revolution described by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, namely that the digital revolution, which is characterised by the fusion of technologies that blur the traditional boundaries between the physical, digital and biological.
All aspects of the water sector are concerned: management of the resource (use of data regarding the quantity and quality), management of the risks (increasingly advanced monitoring technologies), distribution and sanitation in a smart city context (combination between AI, IoT and other technologies), the development of reuse (encouraging decentralisation of water management) and the development of new resources (desalination, recovery of water contained in the air, etc.).
Positions are being taken up in these domains both by majors such as Microsoft and IBM and also by very small but extremely promising players, such as certain highly specialised start-ups. Pollutec 2018 will bring together a wide panel of these innovative players and shall also be a chance to discover the very latest regulatory progress.