Global Solutions to Local Water Challenges
UNLEASH Lab 2017 brings together people from around the world to find solutions to some of the toughest problems we face as global citizens, the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Together with my fellow members of the inaugural UNLEASH class, I hope to share ideas for solutions to the problems addressed by the SDGs. At the core of my efforts, a quote from Gandhi: “our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.” The SDGs do not affect a single nation, or a group of nations, but the entirety of nations, of civilization. Therefore, a solution requires a diverse input from a collection of passionate problem solvers from around the world.
My primary motivation for attending UNLEASH is the lack of comprehensive water data that is so essential in informing urban sustainable water use. Why water use? My interest began during a journey far from home. A mere undergraduate engineering student, I spent a summer studying micro-hydropower among the Himalayas in Nepal. In visiting sites and taking water samples, I was exposed to drastically different water needs than accustomed to. The scarcity of fresh water and limited infrastructure was staggering. But what amazed me even more was that the people I met all understood the value of water and considered it a precious resource. Learning about the water needs of a country so different from my own ignited my interest in finding a solution to managing urban water systems not only for my generation, but for future generations.
Today, I work as a water resource engineer for Arcadis, managing and designing water management solutions in New York City. New York City has a renowned system that delivers fresh drinking water to 8 million residents! Some interesting facts about NYC’s water system: It requires minimal treatment before it is delivered to homes and businesses. Its transportation mechanisms are 95% gravity based, so very little energy is used to pump water over 125 miles from the reservoirs in the Catskills to the city. Such established and seamless infrastructure makes it easy to think that our fresh water resources are limitless. However, this abundance is a perception: New Yorkers’ water use has a HUGE the impact on the local environment.
Like any global metropolis, New York City has imminent storm water and wastewater management challenges. Throughout the year, excess sewer water and stormwater are disposed of directly into the rivers and canals that surround and run through the city. My current work (and past research) focus on ways to help prevent this contamination through green infrastructure.
Through natural mechanisms, such as soil, plants, and sunlight, green infrastructure can capture stormwater in cities. Planned correctly, green roofs, rain gardens, right of way bioswales, and other types of green infrastructure can improve our underground water systems by reducing infrastructure maintenance needs, improving the quality of our surrounding water bodies, and therefore decreasing water-borne illnesses due to contamination.
But green infrastructure is just the beginning of sustainable urban water management. Innovations in monitoring devices hold the potential to save water before a source is depleted or severely limited. More granular customer data can help users become more efficient in their water usage habits.
It will be a team effort to ensure water supplies are sustained, and it will take not only the efforts of the innovators, and water utilities managing water at the source, but those managing it at the tap as well. The SDGs that UNLEASH 2017 hopes to address are global, complex and demand a sense of urgency from us. These sustainability challenges will not be solved within ten days. However, our collaboration at UNLEASH is an opportunity to accelerate our thinking about these problems, giving us diverse, fresh insights and inspiration from each other’s work and mission to bring back to our communities.
We cannot solve these grand challenges in isolation. My hope is that our collaborative thinking, openness to new ideas and zeal for sustainable solutions will allow this conference to live up to its name: a forum for the unleashing of creative energies toward productive, sustainable solutions.
