For nearly three decades, Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) has hosted the annual World Water Week, which it describes as “the annual focal point for the globe’s water issues.” The 2019 World Water Week, which took place in late August of that year, addressed the theme of “Water for society – Including all.” 

For the 2019 World Water Week, thousands of water experts, policymakers, business professionals, and more from hundreds of countries and organizations convened to discuss how people can band together to innovate new solutions for ensuring global access to water. As this year’s theme suggested, conversations focused on how nobody should be left behind in the quest to eliminate water scarcity across the world.

Why did World Water Week choose this theme?

In deciding on 2019’s theme, SIWI and World Water Week acknowledged that water shortages and contaminated water sources disproportionately affect different global communities. In World Water Week’s own words, “not everybody is impacted in the same way by too little, too much or too dirty water.” To address this theme, World Water Week looked at the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), among the many uses of which are correlating water shortages to issues such as poverty, gender inequality, and war.

Encompassed in the SDGs and 2019’s World Water Week theme were the following questions:

1. Who needs water and water treatment methods? To properly meet the SDGs, World Water Week posits that it’s important not just to figure out who needs water, but for what reasons they require water — economic, health-related, infrastructural, etc. — and where these people are located. In identifying needs and locations, problem-solvers can devise solutions that best deliver water to the people and areas in need.

2. How does climate change affect global efforts to preserve healthy ecosystems for people and nature? Climate change is an undeniable driver of the global water crisis. With World Water Week’s inclusivity theme, the week’s participants looked at where climate change is most seriously imperiling water access, such as in Chennai, India, where an urban water crisis is in full effect.

3. Will efforts to preserve healthy ecosystems effectively combat the global forced migration crisis? Wars are often fought over water access. In the direst of wartime situations, people desperate to flee violence migrate to safer lands. World Water Week’s inclusivity theme thus involved efforts to make sure that all people, especially those displaced by water shortages, are considered.

4. Can bolstering global economies counter the global water crisis? In strong economies, public water systems are of higher quality. The relationship between water and the economy cannot be understated, as certain industries depend strongly on water availability to persist.

5. How does proper regulation of water increase its accessibility? Government involvement in water poses especially intriguing questions regarding inclusivity. In some regions, natural water sources are far too frequently accessed to provide citizens with drinkable water, even by public water treatment and distribution facilities. In Chennai, on the other hand, some say that stronger government intervention could have entirely averted the crisis.

6. How can those fighting the global water crisis ensure that all innovations are inclusive and sustainable? This final question is somewhat of a sum of the questions preceding it, if not the very goal of the 2019 World Water Week. Even the most game-changing solutions may leave people behind or harm the earth, and the 2019 World Water Week posited that any viable solutions need to include all life and resources on this planet.

How Oxydus ensures inclusivity and sustainability in its water innovations

At Oxydus, our solution utilizes atmospheric water generation (AWG) to create clean water that can be distributed to communities across the world. In this process, ambient moisture is converted to water.

AWG machines have existed for decades, but they often struggle to produce large enough quantities of water to properly and sustainably supply the needs of a community or region. They also don’t effectively filter water or function at humidity levels below 35 percent. Our AWG solution addresses all these concerns, and in doing so, it achieves sustainable water generation that serves all people.

We achieve AWG in our AWG factories, which can be built anywhere and generate enough water to ship, in fully biodegradable water bottles, to any communities that need it. Our fully solar-powered, temperature- and humidity-controlled factories draw in outside air — an unlimited resource — and pass it through two state-of-the-art filters before converting it to water. After the water is generated, we again filter out all possible contaminants. We then add minerals to the water as required by local and regional authorities. Only then is the water ready to package and distribute. Each scalable factory can generate 10,000 liters of pure water per day as a baseline, ensuring that anyone who needs water can access it without harming the environment in any way.

Our AWG factories provide the exact type of inclusive, sustainable global water crisis solution that the 2019 World Water Week theme sought to find. Click here to visit the Oxydus Wefunder page and learn how you can contribute to a permanent infrastructure that could help to provide clean water for all.