Water is considered as a “universal solvent”. It can dissolve more substances compared to any other liquid on earth. This property of water makes it crucial for life. However this very property also makes it uniquely vulnerable to pollution.
Toxic substances from farms, towns and factories readily dissolve and mix with it causing water pollution.
According to a UN report – every day, 2 million tons of sewage and other effluents drain into the world’s waters. Every year, more people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war.
The most significant sources of water pollution are lack of inadequate treatment of human wastes and inadequately managed and treated industrial and agricultural wastes.
Declining water quality has become a global issue of concern as human populations grow, industrial and agricultural activities expand, and climate change threatens to cause major alterations to the hydrological cycle.
A United Nations article puts in Globally, 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, contributing to a situation where around 1.8 billion people use a source of drinking water contaminated with feces, putting them at risk of contracting cholera, dysentery, typhoid and polio.
The situation is worse in low and lower-middle income countries, where cities and towns discharge their waste water into the closest surface water drain or informal drainage channel directly or with very little treatment. Apart from urban households, urban-based hospitals, middle to small scale industries and motor garages dump their highly toxic medical and chemical waste in the natural hydrological bodies like rivers and lakes.
Governments across the globe are taking measures to resolve the situation but there are hurdles – technical, political and economical.
Increased urbanization, industrialization, population growth and living standard has contributed to ever increasing demand for water.
The gap between global water supply and demand is projected to reach 40% by 2030 by a report from the World Economic Forum.
17% of the world’s renewable water resources is being withdrawn, after taking into account environmental flow requirements. (SDG indicator 6.4.2, 2018)
In many places demand has already crossed a sustainable supply and in some places it has already resulted in acute shortages.According to a report by OECD with the total water demand in India expected to rise by over 70% by 2025, a huge demand-supply gap is expected in the coming years. This will act as a potentially significant constraint on economic growth.
Water insecurity can open up a pandora’s box of social issues from economic slowdown to myriad health issues.. It could trigger the global food crisis and push back thousands to millions of people below poverty line. Wastewater can be used as a good alternative to our conventional water supply. Its use, or recycling after suitable treatment, can provide economic and financial benefits. The opportunities from exploiting wastewater as a resource are enormous. Safely managed wastewater is an affordable and sustainable source of water, energy, nutrients and other recoverable materials. (UN WWDR, 2017).
The costs of wastewater management are greatly outweighed by the benefits to human health, economic development and environmental sustainability – providing new business opportunities and creating more ‘green’ jobs.
Solution
Saving hydrological systems from degradation is a multidisciplinary issue and requires solutions from but not limited to computer science for modeling and data insights, material science, microbiology business and politics.
The major technical issue that we are going to discuss in this article is water quality data. Water quality data are not collected routinely in a majority of countries. This means that over 3 billion people are at risk because the health of their freshwater ecosystems is unknown. (UN-Water 2021). Even when water quality data is available it is not made available in a timely and consistent manner. Either the data is stale to make any effective action plan or it is not consistent enough to test any model or extract useful insights.
Absence of central data processing and analytics unit results in another problem. It hampers the ability to understand the problem at a wider level. Oftentimes data is collected from one river or lake or very few hydrological bodies in the geography, leaving other water resources in the ignored and susceptible to pollution. Next is the flow of high quality data to its respective stakeholders, so that they can participate and contribute to the resolution of the wider issue.
To tackle the issue of data collection a comprehensive strategic plan is required rather than adopting a tactical approach.
We can leverage Big Data and data analytics to create a Digital Water Network.
Real time sensors should be used to collect data from rivers at different stages of its flow. This will help analyze and pinpoint the exact stress point in the river. The real time data collection and prediction models will help to remediate issues before they become difficult to manage.
Satellite images and machine learning models can be used to monitor small water streams and hydrological bodies, thus keeping track of overall geography.
Simulation models, and optimization algorithms can be utilized to better understand the pollution state and how it impacts the need for oxygen, energy, and chemicals. Then we could produce and plan for the operations and how to adjust the use of resources and devise a plan.
ANN( Artificial Neural Network ) tools have the ability to evaluate historical data collected from different river stations and wastewater treatment plants with minimum errors within a short time. Different types of ANN algorithm such as feed-forward backpropagation (FFBP) algorithm, gradient descent, Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) and many have been employed in the prediction and monitoring of water quality parameters. Furthermore, modeling alongside forecasting of water quality parameters would act as a big leap for government agencies and independent organizations in monitoring, decision making and regulating waste discharged into natural water bodies in order to achieve a safe and improved water quality for users.
Currently, fresh water is already limited as it is. Out of the 70% of the water that is available, only 0.03% is made up of fresh water. Every day, the population begins to increase, making the already limited amount of water much less. The costs of wastewater management are greatly outweighed by the benefits to human health, economic development and environmental sustainability – providing new business opportunities and creating more ‘green’ jobs.
It is a high time for us to judiciously manage our water resources.
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