How Blockchain and AI help tackle the Chennai Water Crisis?
With various sources of water drying up and surveys predicting Chennai to run out of groundwater by 2020, the city needs immediate solutions
The Chennai Water crisis has garnered international attention with International superstar and UN messenger of peace with a special focus on climate change, Leonardo DiCaprio, sharing a post on his Instagram account about the Chennai water crisis and wrote, citing BBC News “Only rain can save Chennai from this situation.”
The alarming water shortage has forced Chennai to scramble for urgent solutions. The depleted water level has forced the hotels and restaurants in the city to shut down temporarily. The air con in Chennai’s metro trains has also been turned off. The crisis seems to deepen every day with increasing reports of long queues, intermediate water supply and clashes between residents.
So is there any way to avoid such crisis in future? Is there a robust solution to deal with water scarcity situations in coming future? Does applying technologies like AI and Blockchain in water resource management provide sustainable water supplies for people around the world?
Blockchain & AI to ensure Water Security
For a future that assures water security to every citizen, we need to establish the right governance frameworks and policies, societal engagement and acceptance, and investment landscapes and financing models for water management. Harnessing the rapid advancements in emerging technology represented by the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” can yield advantages in efficient water abundance and scarcity pattern identification for equitable multi-sale water resource management.
Decentralised Water Resource Management
Blockchain Technology would revolutionize the water management in our country by providing more transparency to the sector with regards to spending, contracts, supply chain management, and payments and pricing. The breakthrough technology would reduce corruption to ensure that everyone receives fairly-priced clean water and affordable water services. Blockchain has changed the way we access information and ushered a real-time approach to water management.
The features of distributed ledger technology can be harnessed to enable everyone from households, industry consumers, water managers and policymakers to make more informed decisions by analyzing data on water quality and quantity. The availability of an immutable water quality and quantity ledger would prevent corruption by local authorities to tamper with or withhold water quality data.
Peer-to-peer trading of Water
By providing a secure, transparent and distributed ledger to record transactions between parties, Blockchain technology can fundamentally transform how water is traded by supporting peer-to-peer trading of water rights in a given basin. First-and-foremost, harnessing peer-to-peer water trading would empower water users who have enough or are willing to share their excess resources with others in the area to do so 24/7 without relying on a centralized authority. The transparency and real-time approach to water management would democratize access to information and prevent the tampering of data, mitigating tension across communities.
Decentralized water reuse systems
The urban population witnessing continuous growth, projected to be 7.3 billion by 2050, reusability of water is an extremely important factor. Large-Scale centralised water infrastructure is most likely to fail due to several factors like financial constraints, governance challenges or climate variability. Technologies such as IoT and Artificial Intelligence will prove essential in bringing decentralized solutions to scale and empower reusability of water driven by the falling cost and improved efficiency of innovations such as membrane bioreactor technology (MBR).
Sanitation and Water Smart Cities
The concoction of emerging technologies like IoT, big data and artificial intelligence are creating a wellspring of opportunities, making cities smarter about the water resource they already hold. The combination of these technologies is disrupting the provision and maintenance of water and sanitation services in cities by retrofitting cities to become more resilient and designing basic service delivery systems to meet the needs of expanding urban areas. The integration of Sensors and Wi-Fi in the sanitation network of urban areas would generate valuable data and information on public health and consumer behaviour, as well the quality of maintenance systems and need to optimize routes for waste collection and transportation. The smart and decentralised water network would ensure better health and resilience of our cities.
Source: Development Asia
The breakthrough in technologies like AI and Blockchain has given us a greater ability to track and mitigate water-related risks. Satellite imagery and other earth observation, combined with remote sensing, IoT, AI, Blockchain and other emerging technologies, will enable us to detect water basin risks earlier and quantify it, and then identify and implement solutions to manage it accordingly.
For more details visit our website https://towardsblockchain.com/
