Digital tools for water management: Symsites and Water4All Partnership 

Our world is rapidly changing. Climate change seems to accelerate at a great pace and recent geopolitical and health events call for new measures to guarantee water supply for all. Among the initiatives in place to face the situation, the Water4All Partnership is tackling water challenges by boosting systemic transformations and changes across water research.
Symsites contributed to the initiative by sharing the projects’ innovative digital approach during the second Stakeholder Consultative Workshop on Digital Water Management.

The Workshop

The Water4All Partnership uses a participatory approach to update the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), a document covering knowledge gaps and topics in need of further research. The Stakeholder Consultative Workshop was a tool to gather participants’ ideas and recommendations to include in the second version of the strategy.
The event took place in Lisbon from June 3rd to 4th, 2024 and gathered experts from various sectors to discuss the implementation and challenges of digital water management tools. The workshop attracted around 30 participants, representing both problem holders and solution providers, including water management authorities, utility representatives, academic researchers, and industry professionals.

Symsites’ Digital Approach

During the networking event, Juan Sobreira, a member of the Board of the Spanish Water Technology Platform and part of ITG’s Team, shared with the audience the Digital Approach of Symsites.

The strategy answers the need to provide digital support to stakeholders with different needs:

• Technicians: valorisation of data-driven processes, Artificial Intelligence and hybrid models for waste and wastewater valorization.
• Policy Makers: Evaluate the potential of the Circular Economy in a specific region and build a Decision Support System based on Agents Modeling for informed policymaking.
• Companies: Facilitating matchmaking within the circular economy market.

Benefits and challenges of digital tools in water management

Adopting digital tools in water management is becoming vital for efficiently managing water resources, optimizing use, saving costs and also making more informed decisions regarding water allocation, infrastructure investments, and policy making.

The options include a range of technologies and systems to improve data collection, analysis and decision-making processes, among them:

• Smart water meters
• Remote sensing and Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Machine Learning
• Cloud Computing platforms
• Mobile applications

To increase their use, some challenges discussed during the workshops need to be addressed:  

• Ensuring the quality, accuracy, and reliability of data collected.
• Achieving interoperability among a diverse array of digital tools, often developed by different vendors or organisations.
• Avoid cybersecurity risks
• Ensuring compliance with Privacy and Data Protection policies
• Facing disparities in access to digital tools, internet connectivity, and technological literacy among different stakeholders, communities, and regions.
• Dealing with limited funding, budget constraints, and competing priorities that may affect the adoption of digital solutions.
• Analyzing the factors contributing to the slow uptake of digital technologies in the water sector.

These kinds of initiatives increase the discussion and encourage cooperation among different projects and initiatives. Participating and sharing our findings can help address the main challenges and design future strategies in digital water management.