Digitizing Water Resilience – Acting on Water Stress in Basins

The call is a partnership between the European Space Agency, CEO Water Mandate and 30+ members of the Water Resilience Coalition, to address the global water crisis. These members include 3M, Cargill, Diageo, Microsoft, Bayer, Starbucks, UNICEF and more (you can view these at the bottom of web page Water Resilience Coalition – Sign the business pledge to preserve the world's most water-stressed river basins (ceowatermandate.org).
There will be two phases to this project if successful:
•Initial smaller scale demonstration project (2023 – 2025)
•Scaling the development of generation water resilience monitoring solutions (2025 – 2030)

The Problem to Solve
The world’s 100 most-populated river basins are indispensable resources for billions of people, companies, farms, and ecosystems. But over the next decade, the world will experience a 56 percent shortfall in freshwater supply. Climate change is greatly exacerbating this water crisis; unless urgent action is taken, severe impacts – like intensified floods and prolonged droughts – will only worsen in the coming years.
Current data on basins can be:
•incomplete, with limited datasets
•inconsistent, with different data being collected at basins
•dispersed, with data scattered across multiple platforms, and
•outdated, with databases needing the next generation of information to assess water resilience
Feasibility Studies should start in 2023 and run for one year.

Project Proposal
The purpose of this project is to conduct a feasibility study that will develop and trial a prototype solution for an end-to-end water basin monitoring system. The prototype will consist of sensors, full drop-in and agnostic communications infrastructure, comprehensive data analytics and data visualisation.
Our proposal will be to develop and trial a prototype end-to-end solution which is an intelligent combination of IoT, hybrid connectivity technologies, and advanced analytics software to offer an end-to-end CAAS solution as a market first.
Different solutions are available in the market, however the innovative combination of aligning these technologies gives this project a significant advantage to actively monitor 24/7 a wider range of parameters across water basins and visualize the current baseline of water stress at priority basins – regardless of location, accessibility, or available connectivity infrastructure. In summary the proposed solution will:
•Monitor a chosen water basin using sensors and satellite imagery
•Move data via cellular and dual satellite backhaul (for maximum resilience)
•Deliver aggregated data, combined with various other datasets, to a shared platform which will provide policymakers, researchers, and businesses with continuous access to the latest data from the basin – even if it had been previously inaccessible.

Sensors, in conjunction with satellite imagery data, will be deployed to measure water stress levels, as well as the following parameters to determine river basin water quality – these may include:

•Conductivity and Temperature
•Dissolved Oxygen (optical)
•pH or pH / ORPDepth (integral)
•Total Algae (Dual-channel Chlorophyll and Blue-green Algae)
•Turbidity

Project Objectives:
•Gather and align water resilience-specific needs and requirements.
•Design and develop a prototype of an end-to-end water basin monitoring system.
•Trial prototype of end-to-end water basin monitoring system in 1-2 water basin sites.
•Establish the commercial viability of the prototype and produce a go-to-market strategy and pricing scheme.
•Gather marketing content from project activity.
•Conduct an Impact Analysis on the application of the solution to a water basin.