Cape Town water crisis: ENVIENTA is at the forefront of international co-operation
“There are only 95 days left before we reach Day Zero.” — Cape Town council made a statement in its release on January 15th, 2018. “The Day Zero, when the city is forced to shut down the majority of taps, will arrive on April 21st, 2018.” With the participation of ENVIENTA, an international coalition was set up to address the crisis.
As it has been heard over the recent weeks, the capital of the Republic of South Africa, Cape Town is under severe water scarcity due to the three-year droughts in a row. Experts say the solution to the crisis could take years. However, the inhabitants of the city do not have enough time, the capacity of the reservoirs is finite.
You can find out more about the problem here below:
New York Times: http://nyti.ms/2C8BZ5w | CNN: http://cnn.it/2FgyeK1 | BBC: http://bbc.in/2EEhECK
In the context of climate change, in the near future, we will face water outages at several locations around the planet, and this will require a system-wide solution. However, the founders of the Hack The Water Crisis initiative feels that instead of institutionalized solutions and capital-intensive large investments, we should put more focus on the collaboration between the Internet community and the local population, in the spirit of cosmo-localization.
More details: http://hackthewatercrisis.org
In connection with this initiative, Michel Bauwens, President of the P2P Foundation, presented the philosophy of ENVIENTA and its related organizations.
It is infinitely simple to put this principle into practice. If anyone, anywhere in the world is planning one or more technical solutions to solve a local water crisis and uploads it to the ENVIENTA online platform, you are likely being the part of the local or online hackathon on February 24–25 in Cape Town creative idea contest. After all the plans have been published, the local communities will have free access to them, from which the first prototypes can be created, and after testing, small series production can be started.
The evaluation of the submitted projects will be carried out jointly with SAREBI South African business incubator and will be screened for potential investors in the framework of the OSCE Days Global Event Series, which will take place in 2018. Check out our online video series about the ENVIENTA OSCE Days 2017 event.
The registration process can be found at http://hackthewatercrisis.org.
What kind of technical solutions do we expect?
There are a number of distributed water harvesting technologies that can be built to serve an individual home or an entire community including:: passive air condensation technologies (fognets), passive underground condensation technologies, rain harvesting, desalination. In addition, constructed wetlands can clean and filter water that can then be reused for irrigation or for other residential use.
Open source hardware development
As like other hardware developments, we also provide the technical solutions to solve the water crisis with Creative Commons license, which allows the owners of blueprints to protect intellectual property rights (copyright) to share some of the protected rights with the community while the rest to themselves could be kept. More information about open source hardware.
In addition to ENVIENTA project, the following participants are also member of the initiative:
Stop Reset Go, Cape Town Science Centre, OSCE Days, Action Foresight, P2P Foundation, Global Movement Summit, SAREBI
Related Content: article on P2P Foundation: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/hack-cape-crisis-opportunity/2018/02/17
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