Assessing Global Water Megatrends

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Assessing Global Water Megatrends

Chapter of the book ‘ Assessing Global Water Megatrends’ , Asit K. Biswas, Cecilia Tortajada and Philippe Rohner (Editors)

Currently some 2.5–3.0 billion people do not have access to clean water. To ensure all these people and an additional 2.3 billion people expected by 2050 have access to adequate quantity and quality of water for all their needs will be a very challenging task.

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Future water-related problems and their solutions will be very different from the past. Identification and solutions of these problems will require new insights, knowledge, technology, management and administrative skills, and effective coordination of multisectoral and multidisciplinary skills, use of innovative approaches, adaptable mindsets and proactive functional institutions.

Many of the existing and widely accepted paradigms have to be replaced in the future turbulent and complex era of widespread social, economic, cultural and political changes. The new paradigms must accommodate diversified and contradictory demands of different stakeholders and their changing economic, social and political agendas.

Rapidly changing global conditions will make future water governance more complex than ever before in human history. Water management will change more during the next 20 years compared to the past 100 years. Policies and strategies that are future-oriented need to be formulated, which can reform public institutions, satisfy evolving social and economic aspirations and concurrently overturn decades of water misuse and overexploitation.

During the coming uncertain era, water policies have to juggle regularly with competing, conflicting and changing needs of different users and stakeholders and simultaneously ensure water, food, energy and environmental securities. Water is one of the few common threads that will bind the development concerns of the future. In the wake of the revolution taking place in water management, many long-held concepts are likely to disappear completely.

New paradigms and models need to be developed to successfully meet the water challenges of the next three decades.

Asit K. Biswas and Cecilia Tortajada
Chapter of the book ‘Assessing Global Water Megatrends’, Asit K. Biswas, Cecilia Tortajada and Philippe Rohner (Editors), 2018, Springer-Nature, Singapore, pages 1-26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6695-5_1

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  1. Thank you. I wish to inform you about our solution (copyrights reserved to http://www.pranasustainablewater.ch/en/index.php. 

    Futures contracts can enable treated wastewater to be bought and sold prior related deliveries to fund efficient wastewater and sanitation valorization infrastructures and disrupt the supply chains. 

    Investments (e.g. by pension funds) in commodities backed by futures contracts are attracting funds because of transparency, liquidity and safety. Oil, copper, wheat, cotton, ... are traded prior their productions, why not treated wastewater? Water is indeed the most traded good in the world (embodied in products and services)!

    Prana Sustainable Water's commoditization solution has been designed to reduce massively the +/- 85% of wastewater untreated today, to increase access to sanitation, to address water deficits and unreliable supplies and markets.

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    1/ Water and market security

    Selling treated wastewater in advance - thanks to its W2AREX®  commoditization - can allow the wastewater recycling facilities to get visibility and fix prices of their future deliveries and therefore obtain funding. This resolves gaps to finance water infrastructures.

    Buying W2AREX® Futures Contracts of commoditized treated wastewater in advance can allow to secure water required for later delivery, save costs and reduce risks, brand reputation (people judge by impact not by intentions) and secure markets;

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    Wastewater can have a higher value than clean water when recycled e.g. into energy, fertilizers, bio-cements, …etc and/or when recovered products are valorized.

    This means that some goods or services could be paid or exchanged with the value of wastewater resources.

    This can create a circular economy enabling communities or industries supplying wastewater to get benefits, products and/or incomes. This can bring new markets of more than 2bn consumers (via poverty alleviation thanks to access to sanitation and to wastewater supplies), organize food/productions security and boost responsible products adding or easing the valorization of wastewater.

    The suppliers of wastewater benefit the advantages of the agreed price and volume at B2B level of W2AREX® futures minus some costs. This supplier of “raw materials” could get for example reverse credits e.g. to equip his house for (improved) access to sanitation

    More generally it reverses the architecture of the supply chain:

    . some productions planned according to the requests of end consumers via their valued wastewater resources to produce what, where and how it makes sense (ie. reusing wastewater)

    . some productions designed to add value to wastewater (e.g. personal hygiene products to be added to wastewater biogas after use).