2021 Review

The 10th edition of the World Water-Tech Innovation Summit on February 23-24, 2021 welcomed its largest audience to date with 435 delegates from 46 countries.

The summit was joined by the world’s leading utilities, regulators, engineering firms, technology giants, start-ups, and investors.

Check out our summit highlights below!

“The main challenges to consider are tailored systems to help societies live in a resilient world for the future. We also need to redesign operations that are not only optimising profits, social well-being or resilience, but we need to optimise systems that combine these objectives.”
Johannes Cullmann, Director of Water, Snow & Ice, WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANIZATION

“Innovation is at the forefront of everyone’s minds now. We passionately believe that we can’t come up with these answers on our own and open collaboration is key within our sector and around the world.”
Heidi Mottram, CEO, NORTHUMBRIAN WATER

“We need to be prepared and have back-ups in place. We also need to prepare customers for things that don’t usually happen such as the powerful snowstorm that took place in Greece.”
Harry Sachinis, CEO, EYDAP

“Leakage is not just a technical issue for us, or even a financial one, it is a societal and political issue for the whole of the UK. Our performance has improved and continues to do so, we are currently at about 13% which is the lowest in the UK.”
Mel Karam, CEO, BRISTOL WATER

“There are a lot of leakage events that occur in our water networks but sometimes the problem is around not being able to see the wood for the trees. You tend to get a very tactical and reactive approach where there are a lot of leakage events coming in. They are tackled in priority of what is the most important leak and that is not very well understood.”
Matthew Hawkridge, CTO, OVARRO

“In Valencia, every consumer has a smart meter and we have improved our results because we now know how much water is coming into the DMA and how much we are supplying. The smart meters have enabled us to improve our hydraulic modelling and use this to predict when we have a leak and where the leak is.”
Pilar Conejos, Head of Network Control and Regulation, GLOBAL OMNIUM

“The World Bank has estimated that an additional $114bn is needed every year in capital expenditures alone if we are to reach universal access to water and sanitation by 2030 as envisioned by SDG6.”
Lisa Schechtman, Senior Policy & Partnerships Advisor, USAID

“Financing is not the challenge; we need better projects. We lack good projects that can attract investment. The issue isn’t the lack of money, but how to implement the viability of that money, especially with international investors.”
Fabio Abrahao, Director of Infrastructure, BRAZILIAN DEVELOPMENT BANK

“New policies in Europe demonstrate that we need sustainable societies and economies, and water utilities and weather actors need to work together and respond to the water challenges.”
Ronan Uhel, Scientific Adviser to the Executive Director, EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENT AGENCY

“Don’t fall in love with the game of regulation. Simple is good if it works, but regulation can get very complicated and its important to step back and look at what you’re aiming at and make sure the tools are right.”
John Russell, Director of Strategy & Planning, OFWAT

“Working without open data is like Wacky Races with everyone chasing the same goal using their own proprietary solution when we should be sharing if we want to successfully meet the challenge of NRW and water resilience.”
Victoria Edwards, CEO, FIDO

“Data is much more powerful if we open the figures to others. Sewers are vital infrastructure in the city and we need to look at new benefits for the citizens. We have many ideas for the sewers such as transporting bioorganic solutions from one city to the other.”
Pierre Andrade, Senior Vice President Digital & Decentralized Solutions, SUEZ

“We need to open up the data sets to engage the public and bring their acceptance. We have found connecting our data sets with ArcGIS is an effective way to create a public facing page. We do this with service lines e.g. lead / not lead / new projects in the area.”
Salil Kharkar, Senior Vice President, Operations & Engineering, DC WATER

Here are just some of the global players and industry leaders who joined us at the virtual World Water-Tech Innovation Summit on February 23-24, 2021:

Join us at the next World Water-Tech Innovation Summit in London on February 22-23, 2022 and we hope it will return to an in-person summit.

Get in touch if you would like to help shape the content and be involved as a speaker, partner or exhibitor.

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