Intelligent, circular, adaptive that is how Bluetech described the key themes across the top 30 papers presented across 4 days at Singapore International Water Week this year, with over 2000 attendees there from Singapore, Asia and across the globe. WaterRA's CEO David Bergmann was there, also attending key Global Water Research Coalition and PUB meetings with Singapore's national water agency. Key themes across the conference program included:
- Flood mitigation and coastal protection – managing at scale!
- Water scarcity and security – in a changing climate ...
- Data centres – will drive innovation in low grade heat recovery and water treatment
- Net zero – keeping the momentum going
- Biosolids – adaptive pathways and options are emerging globally
- Direct potable reuse – it's happening
- Contaminants – short chain PFAS and beyond
Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Nitrous Oxides, and the Net Zero journey
Monday kicked-off the conference with a GWRC-facilitated workshop exploring the soon to be published "Practical Protocol to Monitor and Quantify Nitrous Oxide (N₂O) Emissions from Full-Scale Wastewater Treatment Plants". Good monitoring will enable process optimisation and mitigation of this potent greenhouse gas.
Aligned to this topic was also another panel that explored global perspectives on the momentum of water utilities journey to Net Zero - Lucy Thomas from RSK Group summarises some of the key takeaways, noting that there are competing challenges that will affect net zero attainment, including increased pollutant load and increasing population, with a need to work together across the sector - and with other sectors - to improve circularity and return on investment.
Advances in biosensors for chemical and pathogen detection
Advances in biosensors for chemical and pathogen detection continue to be plagued by matrix issues, lifetime and robustness issues. DNA-based technologies seem to be emerging across from other fields, and the use of AI to clean-up, analyse and integrate data seems to be making the greatest progress in this area.
Resource Recovery
There were too many presentations to get to covering biosolids and nutrients. Cellulose was mentioned by a small number of speakers, including chemical engineer and sustainability leader Mar Micó Reche and Atkins Realis. (On that note, there is still an opportunity to join the SMaRT-Pack collaboration.)
Leadership and governance
We heard from the deputy Prime Minister of Singapore that a third of Singapore is at risk of sea level rise; he urged the audience to "plan early - and implement across decades". The Singapore '4 taps' strategy was outlined: it includes the various sources and types of water and uses. The special UN Envoy for Water called for the recognition of water as a strategic asset, and a new generation of water governance that:
- Places water and water circularity at the centre of government
- Accelerates robust action on water for the economy - access, value for every drop, and growth
- Moves from projects to systems - financing and institutional support and partnership
The Minister’s representative from UAE described "water as the operating system of the economy", and the Chair of IPCC working group 2 – Professor Winston Chow – gave us these take-away messages:
- Water resilience is a portfolio – there is no single solution
- Adaption finance is security finance – delays increase costs and reduce choices, with major gap still in funding, and water security needs anticipatory funding not present or delayed
- Climate science must be part of decision making in government and private company leadership
Contaminants
The winner of the Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize Professor Joan Bray Rose reminded us of the importance to Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment through the example of a cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee in 1993, and with increasing amounts of data through new molecular tools, she envisaged a future where AI is used for better QMRA to integrate data sets better, lab, and other observations.
There was a great series of algae presentations, led-off by Florence Choo from SA Water, who gave a history of the evolution of cyanobacteria in the Murray Darling System. Jia Guo then shared insights into measuring algal density using volatile organic compounds, and Shoya Tomas from Tohoku University talked about the competitive dynamics of toxic and non-toxic Cyanobacteria.
PFAS presentations and discussions seemed to focus on short chain PFAS, and also some granular activated carbon (GAC) regeneration techniques for PFAS treatment. In separate GWRC-facilitated discussions with PUB they raised their concerns and investigations to-date re very short chain PFAS like TFA, nanoplastics, and the Chloronitramide anion that has similar toxicity concerns to NDMA (Fairley et al Science 2024 and Science Direct 2026) from disinfection. Check out our PFAS State of Knowledge report and discus with us the use of the Echidna decision-making tool for emerging contaminant prioritisation.
Purified Recycled Water and Direct Potable Reuse (DPR)
There were several comprehensive sessions on direct potable. One session in particular discussed and referred to at least 9 locations and 3 speakers shared their experience with Windhoek Namibia since 1969, with significant upgrades in 1985, and uses up to a maximum of 35% of highly treated water directly injected into the drinking water system.
Paranaque in the Philippines has been doing it since 2022 and will be doubling capacity to 22ML/day soon. Flanders in Belgium has been producing 50ML/day and directly injecting since May 2025.
The features, barriers and projections of these systems were outlined. Also, an interesting overview was provided on the states in the US that do and don’t have policy and regulatory settings in place for DPR, and also the states that are doing DPR.
Turns out the two are not necessarily related, with the major projects in Texas proceeding without overarching state regulation. Jennifer Molwantwa from the South African Water Research Commission demonstrated that the technical fundamentals in Africa are established for DPR, but lamented the lack of consistent regulatory frameworks, governance, and finance to drive these projects. Check out this great resource from WSAA to get the world view.
There is lots to explore in the WaterRA portfolio on recycled water such as WaterVal and Echidna.
Data Centres
AI is driving growth, and lots of discussion re how Asia will be able to provide the stable infrastructure and environment to support those.
It has been variously estimated that there are 12,000 data centres globally and this is growing rapidly, and that cooling uses up to 97% of a data centres water, and that there is 1% water loss for every 5.5C drop in temperate in cooling towers.
Data centres have existed for a long time already, but AI is driving new requirements for capacity, energy and water. Key water issues seem to be the source/type of water, supply/replenishment, the losses through the cooling towers, and treatment/discharge of the water. The growth in data centres could drive significant opportunity for innovation and new technology for harnessing low grade heat options. For example, the Organic Rankine Cycle and Thermoelectric Generators (see here and here).
If water continues to be the heat transfer medium of choice based on efficiency and cost then this is likely to drive innovation in cooling tower performance, treatment of blowdown water, and treatment of recycled waters. Presenters discussed the use of sensors, AI and optimisation models to improve cooling tower performance (PepsiCo case study – not DC but relevant – and this from MIT, and another showcased new approaches to treatment of cooling tower blowdown waters (the wastewater from cooling towers) such as electrodialysis with ceramic membranes having the potential to increase return cycles from 3-5 to more than 50 – (see here).
We are collaborating in low-grade heat recovery from sewer water with Barwon Water and Taswater if anyone is interested in getting involved and/or expanding the scope, please contact a member of the Research Team.
Amazon Web Services indicated that they are expanding their data centre footprint and described their goal to "return more water than they use" and water strategies to be (in order) – reduce the amount of water used through efficiency; source sustainable water sources; and support external water projects. They currently estimate that they are 75% of the way to be being water positive.
Plenty of background reading is available on these:
Sustainable Water Credits
Interesting data-centre adjacent conversation and workshop on Sustainable Water Credits. Amazon Web Services led a workshop session discussion on a white paper on the topic. It was proposed that a system similar to carbon credits could be developed to help businesses like Amazon become water positive, and also support the business cases for water investment by utilities and governments.
It could potentially use the volume Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting (VWBA) developed by WRI and would also require the potential development and agreement of "scopes" for water ala 1, 2 and 3 for GHG emissions, with some work already undertaken in this space (from the World Resources Institute and SCS). The missing pieces seem to be the regulatory/government drivers/mandates and the supporting governments and compliances frameworks and authorities.
Please reach out to David or the WaterRA team for more information, or to discuss your interest in these topics. And keep your eye out for the imminent release of the Big 8 challenges for research in the Australian water sector and the announcement of the Horizon Planning events in October that will create the research plans to respond to these challenges.