Digitalization and hydroinformatics

Abstract

In early 2022, within the framework of Singapore International Water Week (SIWW), we wanted to find out what well-established senior water professionals from all over the world considered to be the main likely water-related megatrends of the future. Toward this end, Peter Joo Hee Ng, the then Chief Executive of PUB, Singapore's National Water Agency, and one of the world's most forward-looking heads of water utilities we have ever met, and us, sent a request to over 200 leading water experts from all over the world, requesting them to let us know what in their views were the three most important water megatrends of the post-2025 world. This was an open-ended request: the participants were not providing a possible list of megatrends from which they could select only three: they were to identify three without any prompting. Nearly 30% of the people contacted responded to our request. SIWW Secretariat thereafter consolidated all these responses under some broad categories. Not surprisingly, climate change, adaptation, and mitigation headed the list. It was followed by digitalization, urbanization, water reuse, and resource circulatory/circular economy. We selected the top three megatrends and had a special session during SIWW 2022 to discuss the implications of these megatrends to water resources management. To this end, leading world experts were invited to discuss the implications of the identified megatrends. The longer term plan is to consider specific regions of the world and assess how the selected megatrends are likely to affect water resources management during the post-2025 era in a synergistic way. Nearly 90% of data in the world has been generated during the past 2 years. With the extensive use of sensors and robots in the water sector, data generated in the coming years will increase exponentially. Until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of the Second World War, knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Doubling time was reduced to 13 months by 2013 (Schilling, 2013). It is likely to double soon every 12 h, or even less. Storage cost per gigabyte of data was over $1 million in 1980. Now it is a fraction of one cent (Schwab, 2016). It is likely to be almost free in the future with new technological breakthroughs, which are on the horizon. In 2017, the cost of translating one million words, from Chinese to English, was nearly $1 million. Currently, it is approaching zero (Callanan, 2019). Instantaneous, near-zero-cost translation will facilitate significant knowledge sharing and use across languages in the coming years. This will, for the first time in centuries, challenge the pre-eminence of the English language as the preferred medium of knowledge dissemination and use. While knowledge and technology have advanced tremendously during the past two decades, the water profession is still giving too much attention to the experience and paradigms of the past, many of which have become increasingly ineffective, and some even completely obsolete. However, the comfort of the status quo and/or vested interests have kept in use at least 70+ years old paradigms like integrated water resources management and integrated river basin management, even though, for the most part, they have been ineffective for decades for nearly all countries (Biswas, 2004, 2008). During the current era of rapid advances in knowledge and technology, many water professionals and water institutions are often being overwhelmed by the magnitude and extent of the rapid advances in water-related developments. Many are often ignorant of the potential use of new knowledge and information to improve nearly all aspects of water management. Digitalization is one of several important changes in recent years to which a large number of water professionals and institutions have not given adequate attention, often because of sheer ignorance of its potential use to significantly improve existing water planning and management practices a