 Good morning everyone and welcome to IWA's first ever digital World Water Congress. We're really really excited. I'm speaking to you today from the beautiful city of London which actually is quite windy today and we're just about to enter IWA's new headquarters in London, the export building. I've got here with me today Kizito and Mike who are really the brains behind the World Water Congress. So Kizito. Hello everyone we're quite excited to be with you at this fantastic event. We look forward to engaging with you for the next eight days. Hi everyone, we've got a fantastic program coming up that I know you're gonna enjoy full of diverse and intense speeches and we've got some great keynotes to follow so enjoy. We're just about to enter our building and get the Congress going and just before that we're gonna play the IWA Congress video. See you all in a minute. So here we are inside IWA's new headquarters and as you can see it's a beautiful and really colorful building. We're also really happy that we're sharing this office with our publishing unit and we really believe that together we can do magic. We're running a bit out of time so I'm gonna now enter into the meeting room where we have some of our team and some dignitaries waiting so we can kick off the Congress. See you in a minute. Hi everyone. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to you all and welcome to IWA's first ever Digital World Water Congress. I'd like to say a special welcome to our IWA members and to all the participants joining from 75 countries. We have over 1,800 registered delegates attending this action-packed Congress and it's gonna be a fantastic two weeks of presentations, posters, documentaries and so much more. It's gonna be brilliant so really enjoy yourselves. 2020 was a year like no other, one which brought new challenges to each of us both personally and professionally and as a result of the pandemic we had to postpone our physical Congress from 2020 to 2022 and while we really look forward to seeing you all in person in Copenhagen in 2022 we couldn't let another year go by without providing you the international water sector a platform to share your new ideas and innovation and of course to network. COVID-19 has affected us all irrespective of where we were born, our socio-economic status, all the language we speak. The effects of this virus are present and seem to grow continuously. Never before has it been so important that we work together and share ideas. Now is the time for compassion, reflection and coming together to support one another and at IWA we hope you will use this virtual Congress to do just that but you know what they say through adversity comes strength and so as the post-COVID journey now begins we are seeing a restart reset and reinvent evolution and this offers our sector the water sector a small window of opportunity to transform ourselves from 19th century thinking to 21st century thinking. To put it simply now is the opportunity for our sector to build back better. This could be through new process technologies, digital transformation, nature-based solutions, the circular economy, author a new inspiring solution that one of you is on the cusp of inventing. We hope this Congress will engage your curiosity, get your creative juices flowing and provide you with the inspiration to create the change so badly needed by our sector. Let us at IWA support you to bring your knowledge and expertise so that you can help us build back better. This virtual event is just one of the ways we at IWA have responded positively to the challenges created by the pandemic. You know last year we created a COVID-19 task force to help develop measures to protect both public health and also water sector professionals and this task force is still progressing really well and so I'm really grateful for all those involved. We also adapted to the new normal you know with online meetings, workshops and conferences. We had thousands of participants taking part in our online events that included online panels and dialogues, member induction workshops and special events tailored specifically for our young water professionals. And now we have this fantastic virtual event which will probably be the best online water event anywhere in the world. Our mammoth virtual Congress includes 32 hours of content spread over eight days covering multiple time zones to accommodate our global audience. We have a packed schedule covering six key thematic areas with contributions from hundreds of experts from around the world. We have our poster presentations that are available on our platform where you can read and hear about hundreds of new innovations on water management. We will be showcasing three exciting water documentaries that can be viewed free on demand. We will be celebrating the achievements of outstanding and stellar water professionals with our IWA awards and of course we will put in place many opportunities for you to network with your friends and colleagues. When IWA puts on these big events we can't do it without the help of some of our great sponsors. So I'd like to say a few special thank yous. First to our platinum sponsors, Xylem, Kamstrop and Grand Force. To our gold sponsors, Arsalef, Rambo, Kimira and Koei. And to our silver sponsors, Vevin, DHI, Danforce, Eurofins and Silhoka Eurowater. I'd also like to say a special thank you to Xylem who is the sponsor of our plenary sessions and also to Rambo who sponsored our thematic program. You can find out more about our sponsors by visiting their pages on our events platform. And I strongly encourage you to do so. Again, a big thank you to all of our sponsors. Your support has really allowed us to bring together a huge number of water professionals from across the world. As I said to you, I am speaking to you from the beautiful city of London. But we also have our teams in China, India and Kenya who are helping to deliver on this event. And I hope you can see them all beavering away. Now I'd like to travel digitally down under to Australia so we can hear from IWA's new president, Tom Molankov. For those of you who may not know Tom, he's a substantive and well-regarded figure in the international water sector. His experience and knowledge will be invaluable to IWA as we move forward. Thanks Tom for joining us from Australia and over to you. Thank you Carla and greetings to all of you online, wherever you may be. We're so glad that you're participating in our first virtual Congress as we at IWA strive to adapt to the restrictions and rise to the challenges brought about by the current pandemic. Of course, challenges are not new to those of us in the water sector. The world's water challenges are immense and they are existential. Over two billion people without access to safe drinking water and four and a half billion without access to sanitation. Water security is at threat due to overabstraction, increasing urbanisation, growth in demand, pollution and territorial tensions, all compounded by the accelerating impacts of climate change. But these immense challenges bring opportunities. As Carla said, when working together, we have the potential to generate solutions to the pressing issues humanity faces regarding its water needs. But to accomplish this, we must share knowledge, think creatively and collaborate to push for change. While the solutions of the last century may not be the solutions of this one, now more than ever, we have the opportunity to create change. I believe that this virtual Congress will inform, inspire and equip you to discover and collaborate on solutions. Personally, I'm thrilled by the upcoming presentations that traverse the entire water cycle, including wastewater treatment and resource recovery, drinking water and potable reuse, city-scale planning and operations, water utility management, communities, communication and partnerships and water resources and large-scale water management. Across these topics, we have the opportunity to learn about the many solutions already being developed and implemented by water professionals across the globe. I also urge you to take in some of the documentaries we're showing during the event, whether it's the award winning Lords of Water, raising questions around financialisation of water, Brave New World, which paints an optimistic picture of new technology and ideas in our sector, or dry times, highlighting how the global water crisis affects us all. As president of IWA, I want to use my tenure to enhance IWA's engagement, engaging with its members, strengthening our work with utilities around the world. I would have promoted the Sustainable Development Goals agenda and I would have helped build our policy leadership globally. What energises me about this role is the opportunity to offer leadership, share a vision and inspire others to build a world in which water is wisely, sustainably and equitably managed. I'm humbled and excited to have taken up the presidency of IWA. It's an organisation with solid foundations and a compelling bright future. I want to take this opportunity to thank my predecessor, Deanne Darras, for having left IWA in such good shape. She carried out the role of president with a clear vision and sound business sense, all delivered with grace, diplomacy and charm. Deanne worked especially hard to make IWA more inclusive and diverse. I will work hard to maintain her high standards, although I fear that when it comes to elegance, I have no chance of being her equal. As I take up my term as president, I look forward to growing the scale and impact of our programmes and the activities we offer. There is much to do, but the need is great and the benefits of our action will impact the lives of billions of people. And on that note, it's time to hear from our keynote speaker today. He is a leading researcher with a focus on practical, implemented solutions to our problems. Allow me to pass you back to Carla, who will do the honours and introduce our keynote speaker. Thank you very much, Tom. In these unusual times, we need more than ever to challenge the status quo. And we need to do this by willing to present new and at times left filled ideas and to have the tenacity to firmly put those ideas on the agenda. And we need to have the willpower to see these new ideas translate into practical, changemaking and sustainable outcomes. Today we have the great opportunity to hear from one of the world's leading thought leaders of the water industry, a renowned academic and water engineering researcher at UC Berkeley. He also acts as the co-director of the Berkeley Centre for Water. He has received numerous awards, including the Paul Bush Award for Innovation in Applied Water Quality Research and the Clark's Prize for Excellence in Water Research. He is also the author of the book Water 4.0 and this is a great book and if you haven't read it, I really encourage you to do so. It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you all Professor David Sedler. Before I begin, I want to thank the IWA for inviting me to come here and give these remarks to you. As you might have guessed by now, it's the middle of the night in California, so I had to pre-record these remarks so that they could be part of the opening session of the conference. Having like you lived the last 14 months virtually online, I realize it can be hard sometimes to replicate the energy and excitement that comes with an in-person conference and talks that are given live, but I've also come to appreciate some of the other things like the lack of jet lag and sleepless nights spent in strange hotel rooms. The pandemic's given us all a lot more time to reflect on our lives and I've used some of this time to think about what I've learned over the last few years about water scarcity and pollution and how we might use the knowledge that we're acquiring to make water systems less susceptible to crises. And with that in mind, I've come up with some remarks that I want to share with you today so that we could all think about them together, but unfortunately that's going to mean we're going to have to go inside so we can look at some slides. First came the hard path. To meet the needs of rapidly growing populations and expanding economies in the years following the Second World War, society went on a water infrastructure spending spree. Between 1950 and 2000, we built about 40,000 large dams and created dozens of inter-base and water transfer projects that dwarfed the aqueducts of the Roman Empire and the quannets of the ancient Persians. We employed modern technology to dig groundwater wells, install pumps and center pivot irrigation systems to grow food on the arid plains. With these investments, we provided water for the Green Revolution in a period of economic expansion that's been referred to as the great acceleration. Beyond the costs of concrete and steel needed to create all of this water infrastructure, the world paid a steep price for following what has been referred to as the hard path. Tens of millions of people were displaced by dams and water projects. Aquifers were sucked dry. And entire lakes disappeared. Unrestrained development of water infrastructure took a toll on the environment too, blocking the movement of fish, depriving river deltas of sediments and creating conditions that led to the collapse of sensitive ecosystems. By the end of the 20th century, the world had recognized the true costs of water infrastructure. The hard path lost much of its luster. In response, water managers turned to the soft path. After an era of cheap and abundant water, there was plenty of room to realize efficiency gains and reduce water demand while continuing to meet the needs of the world's farms and cities. Over the past 40 years, many cities have met their growing water demand without building any more infrastructure. This has happened through incentives on the purchase of water efficient appliances and policies like the replacement of lawns with less thirsty landscaping. On the efficiency front, water loss from distribution systems has been cut dramatically through approaches like pressure modulation and better asset management. Utilities and governments has even made more progress in educating consumers about the need to use water more wisely. Similar gains have also been seen with respect to water use in other sectors of the economy. The rapid adoption of wind and solar power now coupled with the decreasing popularity of ones through cooling is reducing the amount of water needed for power production. Industries are also turning their attention to closed loop processes as part of their efforts to be central to the circular economy and in water scarce regions of the world flood irrigation has largely been replaced by micro drip and over efficient overhead sprinklers. Now in some parts of the world water scarcity may seem like a remote concern but in others water stress still looms despite the many benefits that the soft path is delivered. Today cities are being stressed by continued population growth and more frequent droughts. Consider the situation in Phoenix, Arizona where the metropolitan population has expanded and will continue to increase by another 70% between now and 2050 while at the same time the average number of days when temperature exceeds 38 degrees centigrade will triple from 40 to 132 per year. This hotter climate will increase outdoor water demand just as the amount of water available from the Colorado River, the source of about 40% of the city's water continues to shrink as the entire region undergoes a long-term drying trend. The impacts of climate change and growth will look different in other water stress cities but Mexico City, Perth, Chennai and Cape Town all face different types of water supply challenges that may not be possible to solve in their entirely with the soft path. In some places cities might take some of the water that's currently being used for irrigation but the agricultural sector is not going to part with their water without a fight. After all they have their own challenge associated with the need to increase harvest by 70% by the year 2050 to meet the growing needs of a more populist wealthier world. Now four decades ago when the soft path was first becoming popular water providers turned to it because there was slack in the system. In many cases these solutions were the least costly environmental damaging ways to meet the needs of society but the easy steps that have been taking may no longer be available to us. In light of the challenges posed by growing demand and shrinking supplies we probably need an all-of-the-above approach. This means finding ways of using water more efficiently but it also means that we need to reuse more of our water and in some cases expand the supply because the policies technologies and decision-making processes needed to support this new approach differs from what we've been doing in recent decades I want to refer to this as the next path. The next path is not a return to the hard path nor is it exclusively a matter of more soft path solutions. It's a hybrid of the two approaches informed by the experiences of the past and enabled by technological advances that are now transforming other aspects of society. Now left on its own I suspect that these approaches would gradually spread across the water field over a period of two to three decades just like the advancements in nutrient removals in wastewater treatment plants shown here did. But I believe there's simply too much at stake to wait for the next path to gradually diffuse into practice as we've done in with other innovations in previous generations. To avoid the water crises that will ensue as climate change and population growth continue to stress our resources I believe we need to rethink some of the ways that we frame our discussions about research development and implementation of new ideas. To illustrate the potential for new technologies to catalyze the next path I want to share three themes that emerged during our recent effort to develop technology roadmaps for desalination and advanced water treatment. I was fortunate enough to be part of this effort as a member of the National Alliance for Water Innovation or NAWI a program initiated by the US Department of Energy to address water insecurity at a national scale. These themes give us ideas about how the next path might develop in response to some of the world's most important water challenges. The first theme is related to the Information Technology Revolution. For over two decades we've been hearing that an IT revolution is going to disrupt the water sector. In anticipation of this event digital water has become one of IWA's main focus areas and the attention that it's receiving is certainly married. Now over the last few years we've started to see major changes in water system operations and management as the analog pen and paper of the 20th century has been replaced by computers in the 21st century. But so far the true potential of this revolution is not as advanced as it is in e-commerce for example or other types of infrastructure like electricity and transportation where the turnover equipment occurs more quickly than in the water sector. When it comes to water quality and water quantity sensors actuators and data processing algorithms have the potential to allow us to get more out of our existing infrastructure and possibly create small-scale autonomous systems the kind that we've been talking about for decades. With these advances we may finally be able to realize new modes of water supply that don't require on-site operators to assure water safety. Let's start with the relatively simple idea of using improvements in weather forecasting to better operate water storage systems. Over the past three decades satellites and radar stations coupled with global circulation models run on supercomputers have increased our ability to predict when it will rain and how much rain will fall. Now in addition to allowing us to plan our weekends better this information is making it possible to get more out of our water storage infrastructure. For example about a hundred kilometers north of San Francisco in Sonoma County the local water agency has partnered with researchers from the University of California Scripps Institute to employ predictions on the paths of atmospheric rivers the large storms that deliver the majority of the region's rainfall so they can better balance the risks of flooding with the ability to capture water. Using data from the historic record they estimate that application of advanced weather forecasting instead of the existing approach of using 1960s era rules curbs in the management of the reservoirs would be equivalent to increasing the capacity of the reservoirs by about 33 percent. Use of better weather forecasts also has been extended to distributed water infrastructure. Stormwater capture ponds and cisterns are being operated by organizations like OptiRTC a company that uses weather forecasting to determine when to remotely trigger the opening and closing of valves. By extending forecast enhanced weather storage management to a small scale the effective size of the infrastructure expands allowing existing assets to be used more effectively to prevent combined sewer overflows. It also has the potential to enable more efficient harvesting of storm water for productive use increasing the amount of the structures we build by using valves that only had the option of being in the open or closed position for long periods of time during the old analog era. These initial wins give us a taste of what can be achieved as we learn how to integrate the streams of data that are being collected in water systems with other sources of information. Now presently there are many R&D efforts underway to realize the promise of things like digital twins and autonomous control but during now is road mapping process we identified the challenge of interoperability of data from multiple sources in a common platform as a key research need that we have to accomplish if we want to provide an easier path to making the most out of these new data streams. This is particularly challenging in a field like ours in which most of the equipment installed is intended to last for several decades and where each piece of equipment communicates with hardware and software that comes from a different era of computing. The water sector may be able to learn from the experiences of other early adopters like the building controls field and can come up with common platforms for integrating disparate types of data. Development of digital water also will advance if data streams can be opened up to researchers who can use them as living laboratories creating algorithms necessary for optimizing operate operations and anticipating and responding to process upsets. Another theme that emerged during now is road mapping process was related to unlocking the full potential of desalination technologies by reducing the cost and simplifying the operation of concentrate management. Now as was the case with solar and wind power with every passing year the cost of desalinating water drops relative to the established approaches. For example as shown in this figure the cost of installed capacity for seawater desalination dropped by a factor of three between 1970 and 2000 as the technology matured and the permitting and financing processes became less risky. As evidenced by experiences recently in Israel, Australia and southern California seawater desalination is matured to a point at which it's often less expensive than other sources in water stressed cities. Meanwhile the use of the same reverse osmosis technology for desalination of brackish water or municipal wastewater affluent has not yet seen the full cost reductions that come with experience. For brackish water desalination especially the biggest impediment may be related to the fact that the concentrate produced by the process has proven to be too expensive to treat by zero liquid discharge or near zero liquid discharge methods in many contexts. If the city cannot use deep well disposal or discharge concentrate to a surface water body where it doesn't cause a problem this potentially transformative technology may not be on the table. The issue of concentrate management is also an impediment in agriculture where salty drainage water from irrigated fields threatens land productivity and the power sector where the blowdown from recirculating cooling systems might languish for months or years in giant evaporation ponds that are expensive and complicated to operate. As we see the situation there are two possible directions around the bottleneck the first requires that we improve upon the existing approach of using concentrators and crystallizers for zero liquid discharge. For example, advancements in materials possibly aided by new technologies like 3d printing could lower the costs and extend the operating range of high pressure reverse osmosis systems that help us get beyond the current limitations of polymeric membranes. Other mechanical approaches for dewatering and crystallizing grinds are also possible with no shortage of ideas waiting to be tested. The other possibility is to make low-tech methods of managing grinds more efficient. For example, salt tolerant plants can be used to decrease the area needed to evaporate water because during evapotranspiration more of the sun's energy is used for the evaporation process than in an old-fashioned evaporation pond where much of the energy is dissipated by heating large masses of water. My UC Berkeley colleague Bowsha Mee has taken advantage of this phenomenon but moved away from plants to a completely engineered system by using an inexpensive piece of cellulose coated with sunlight absorbing graphene oxide to wick up grind and evaporate it while recovering the salts. This simple inexpensive approach has the potential to reduce the size of evaporation ponds by as much as two orders of magnitude. Of course, once you've recovered all that salt it's typically 10 to 100 times more than the amount of rich residuals that are typically produced in a drinking water treatment plant. You need to do something with them. Some efforts have been made to recover valuable products but up until now the prospects for pulling the recovered salts into the circular economy are not that good. Unless your plant is located close to potential users and the purity of material produced is high enough for them you really don't have too many options. In the near term there might be some advantage to making moderately valuable commodity chemicals like sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide that can be used within water treatment systems or sold to industrial users. The prospects for recovering precious metals or other valuable resources has been discussed but at this point the prognosis is not great at least in terms of brackish groundwater. The last theme that emerged in our road mapping process was related to using information technology and advances in modular water treatment technologies to realize the potential for safely operating networks of small-scale treatment facilities. Now I know that this is a topic that's near and dear to much of our community because it offers the possibility of tailoring treatment to the needs of the user and creating more flexible systems that do not require a centralized treatment plant and an expensive and often unreliable underground pipe network. The idea of non-grid solutions and hybrids of centralized and decentralized treatment has been gaining traction in response to addressing the challenge of sanitation and resource recovery from sewage but progress has been a bit slower for a water supply in part due to the challenge of reliably achieving treatment in distributed systems where public health is at risk. In addition to drop drops in the cost of small-scale membrane systems and the advent of sensors and controllers with the digital water revolution which have both been progressing quite quickly in recent years during the now we road mapping process we discovered that electrification of the remainder of the treatment process may play an important role in enabling distributed treatment systems. Electrochemical treatment is proving to be a versatile technology that can reduce or eliminate the need to replenish chemical reagents and remove waste from distributed treatment facilities. With these technologies it's often possible to produce disinfectants and oxidants like chlorine and hydrogen peroxide as well as acids and bases on site on an as needed basis. Electrifying technologies also offers the possibility of reducing scaling and fouling in small-scale desalination systems. I was recently part of an effort led by my colleague Corneal Rubai from Gent University to assess the prospects for household-scale water systems. Perhaps it was more speculative than many of the papers you're used to reading in water research but we posited a system in which a user can not only drink roof water gray water black water or shallow groundwater but they can also adjust the quality to suit their needs and their personal preferences and all of this is facilitated by drops in the costs of desalination technology. Over the past two decades we've come up with a rich vocabulary to describe the future of urban water management and our aspirations for it. One water the circular economy of water integrated water resources management. All of these terms have one thing in common it's the recognition that we're going to have to increasingly access new forms of water that we thought previously were unusable and that we're going to have to pay more attention and be more systematic thinking about the impacts of our use of water on other people and the downstream environment. The other challenge associated with the next path for water is it has to make sense all the different places where it's going to be used. It has to work in arid and in humid places. It has to make sense to people living in wealthy countries and poor countries and it even has to work in urban and rural environments. That's a tall order. The next path that we're about to embark on together isn't going to be an easy one. It's going to require that we think about the lessons from the hard path and the soft path mirrors but at the same time we're going to have to bring in a host of new technologies and make them work with our existing institutions and our existing water systems. We're going to have to do all of this at a time of changing climate and changing aspirations and ideas about what water systems are supposed to be delivering. I can think of no group better suited for taking on this challenge than the people of this conference. Thank you very much for your time and now we move on to the IWA award session. Thank you David. Some people have described the past 12 months as being both the best of times and the worst of times. I was uplifted by your observation about using these times to reflect and in your case to consider the next path for water. As you say it will not be easy but it is achievable. Thank you again David. It's this sort of passion innovation and leadership that the IWA awards program aims to recognize and celebrate and which we will do today by acknowledging the achievements of a number of individuals whose inspiring work is building the water-wise world we all want. I will now be presenting the Young Water Leader Award, the Professional Development Award, the Women in Water Award and the Global Water Award. These awards will go to some amazing individuals who have been selected from highly competitive fields across each category. After I announce each deserving winner we'll have an opportunity to hear briefly from each of them. Our first award is the IWA Young Leadership Award which is granted to an exceptional young water professional who demonstrates significant achievements in their career, outstanding leadership and potential to play an influential role in the water industry in the future. I'm delighted to formally make the award which was announced earlier this year to Dr Siddhartha Roy who is an environmental engineer and postdoctoral research scientist at Virginia Tech in the USA. Dr Roy has conducted a range of research primarily focused on disadvantaged communities. His most significant work in recent years has centered on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan where he helped to uncover high levels of waterborne lead poisoning. His activities have gone much further than traditional academic research and have revealed legal and ethical failings in agencies and water departments. In these efforts Roy has taken personal risks, challenged bad science and misinformation. He has featured on a range of leading media outlets including the BBC, New York Times and Chicago Tribune as well as participating in the PBS documentary Poisoned Water. Congratulations Dr Roy. Thank you Tom and thank you to IWA for this great honor. I'm also grateful to Dr Andrew Welton of Purdue University for nominating me at the distinction of being the first Indian and the first nominee in the United States to receive this award. Fundamentally this prize recognizes scientific and humanitarian work done by our Virginia Tech U.S. water study team with underserved communities like Flint, Michigan, Cicero, Illinois, Denmark, South Carolina and others to uncover unsafe water and environmental injustice. I've personally used my research expertise to answer questions of scientific and societal relevance like how bad was water light exposure influenced children? Were there excess fatal deaths? And how can residents monitor chlorine to better protect themselves from waterborne pathogens like Legionella? We live in extremely challenging times. I'm speaking to you from India where COVID-19 has ravaged cities and villages alike but unsafe water also affects hundreds of millions here and worldwide and reminds us of our field's audacious goal to reduce human suffering and advance well-being by ensuring safe drinking water for all. My PhD advisor Dr Mark Edwards and my father Dr. Sushil Kumar Arroy were especially thrilled when they heard about this award. My father was my first hero, my first science teacher and a role model to thousands of students. It's taught over the years. I lost him unexpectedly and tragically a few weeks ago. So this award is for you Baba and you're unique but flipping purposefully to the lives of everyone around you. As IW's ambassador I'll embark on exchanging ideas, knowledge and values with the excited, clever and altruistic minds of our field and beyond in the hopes that more of us find purposeful triggers and contribute to true human flourishing. Back to you Tom. Thank you Dr. Roy again for your work on this critical health and social issue. Our next award is the Professional Development Award. It recognises organisations in the water sector that have made a significant contribution to the professional development of their employees supporting attraction development and retention of the next generation of water leaders. The winner of the IWA Professional Development Award is INDA Water Consortium, the National Water Company of Malaysia. IWK has a staff of around three and a half thousand serving a population equivalent of more than 26 million people. It receives the award in recognition of its diverse people oriented activities, several of which support the careers of young water professionals. Importantly, this company's activities span leadership and postgraduate development as well as skills and technical areas. IWK has demonstrated a track record of professional development with many of its activities gaining additional credibility from external validation. As a large organisation with national coverage IWK has an important role in shaping professional development in the water sector. Let's hear from INDA Water Consortium now. Thank you Tom and IWA team on behalf of the Board of Directors, Management Team and Employees of INDA Water Consortium in Ubrahand. I'm indeed deeply honoured for IWK to have been selected as the recipients for IWA's Professional Development Award 2021. As a national sewage company for Malaysia we stand proud in undertaking the vital task in ensuring Malaysians today and in the future will be able to enjoy clean and healthy environment through proper and well maintained public sewage thermal facilities. This important responsibility of maintaining more than 7,000 public sewage thermal plants and over 20,000 kilometres of sewer lines is only made possible thanks to the 3,500 tenants that we have nationwide. Since last year it has been tough and difficult to face not just for IWK but companies across the globe in view of the impact due to the pandemic COVID-19. As IWK is considered part of essential services to serve the nation, we will definitely be able to adapt to become more resilient and productivity driven group where we look largely at quality of people and not just quality to support the country's need for clean and proper safe sewage thermal system. This is also towards supporting our company's vision of becoming the premier wastewater company where there's been our priority in advocating the need to enhance knowledge and skills talent in the sewage sector. We have held retention and growth of our employees through professional skill initiative coupled with academic growth opportunities so that they're prepared to apply the full potential to continue the transformation of our business. This is also encapsulated in the goal and the timeline-oriented overarching programme of talent management supporting IWK's goal of having highly skilled workers by 2030 through growth and incompetency such as leadership, creative and innovative skills. We at IWK believe in developing talent for the future in which plans in our diversity agenda. Today we have young water professionals in both technical and non-technical division including those who have been given the chance to lead various important roles throughout the company. The combination of energy and fresh perspective from the young talents along with the wisdom and knowledge from the more experienced professional is one of our important ingredient in our human capital strategy. Winning the development leadership development award is definitely a positive perspective and we will continue in maintaining and enhancing our human capital development as best as we could and spread our ways further domestically as well as internationally in the near future. I'm pleased to also share recently IWK has unveiled our own Asian Silver Age Training Research and Innovation Centre known as S3S which aims at sharing our experience and capabilities with you higher various thought leadership and capacity program building programs and winning this award will definitely boost our spirit towards achieving our goal in developing more water professionals in the region. Thank you once again and we hope to meet you again I'll meet you soon in the near future. Thank you. Congratulations again to Inder Water Consortium. I will now introduce you to a very important award for the IWA the Women in Water Award. The IWA Women in Water Award acknowledges and celebrates female leadership in the field of water. Through this award the IWA recognizes women who through their demonstrated leadership have had a significant positive impact on the development of the industry. The award showcases an individual's excellence in leadership as demonstrated by outstanding initiatives, impact of work and inspiration to others. The recipient of this award has made contributions to the establishment and promotion of community-based initiatives especially those focused on wash, water, sanitation and hygiene and to the roles and needs of women over the past four decades. I'm delighted to announce that the IWA Women in Water Award this year goes to Nafisa Bharat, founder, advisor to and former executive director of Indian NGO Bhutan. Nafisa. Thank you Tom for this award which comes at a time of such acute crisis for all of us. I think back 40 years to a scene I witnessed in the Park Saline region of Bhal in Gujarat, India. It was here that I came across women and girl children in violent conflict over a few cups of muddy water waiting to be scrapped from the bottom of an open underground tank constructed by government. There were screams of anger, frustration and pain. I was shaken as I saw blood dripping in water from the injuries of these women and girl children. Perhaps it was there that I and my Uttan colleague resolved to respond not only to the agony but we had seen also the desperate hope of these communities to address their water issues along with dignity and justice. We went deeper into the issues that demanded changes at social, cultural and governance level. What we learned not just from the women of Bhal but from many others was that overwhelming need for decision makers to listen to the wisdom of local knowledge to respect the ability of local communities and to empower those at grassroots to take charge of their own resources and environments. None of this should have been new all those years ago or now yet the challenge remains of inappropriate perspectives and policies, the dominance of hardware and the reluctance to transfer real power to those who want to take charge particularly if they are women standing strong on issues of justice and equity. The thousands of women leaders we know and work with us are not stuck in the past. For them, reviving traditional systems of rainwater harvesting and conservation is also about innovating sustainable approaches in the harshest conditions through line or online ponds, roof water tanks, well recharging, conserving river water, adopting new behavior towards safe water sanitation and understanding climate change. Much has been achieved over these years and yet need for change remains huge. The pandemic has warned us of the price humanity will have to pay if the imbalance of our time is not attended. It is to this task that I and my colleagues are committed, strengthened by this wonderful gesture of support, understanding and encouragement. Thank you once again. We rededicate ourselves to the mission we share with International Water Association, our valued partner. Thank you. Thank you. Well thank you, Nefisa. Now for our final and most prestigious award. The IWA Global Water Award recognizes those individuals who through innovative leadership and practice have made a significant contribution to a world in which water is wisely managed. The IWA Global Water Award rewards an individual that has shown exceptional imagination, foresight or resilience to overcome obstacles and challenge industry norms to create new directions and open new possibilities for sustainable water management or practice. She or he must have worked inclusively and with professionals from across sectors and disciplines to create an innovative water solution management practice that impacts or influences broader sustainable development. This year's awardee is such a person. He has an extensive career spanning more than 40 years working in the field of water and wastewater treatment and water pollution control. In particular he's recognized for his focus on applied research, pursuing innovation while at the same time aiming at practical application especially in the context of developing countries. He's a full professor at the Department of Sanitation and Environmental Engineering at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil and he co-founded the Center for Research and Training on Sanitation in Belo Horizonte. He has influenced practice in the sector in Brazil, Latin America and internationally through books in several languages as well as numerous national and international research projects and collaborations. I'm delighted to announce that Professor Marcos von Sperling is the recipient of this year's IWA Global Water Award. Professor von Sperling. Thank you very much Tom. Also thank you Kala and IWA staff. I am extremely happy and honoured to be the recipient of such a prestigious award. I have been an IWA member for around 35 years and I always felt very well received and embraced in all the activities I had with the association. I come from Brazil, a country that faces huge challenges related to water instantiation management. In the world so many countries have similar challenges and require the support from responsible and not knowledgeable institutions and their members. Although there are no easy and ready to use solutions, IWA can continue to play a vital role in this process of strengthening regional science technology and practice, always taking into account local specificities. I have always been very lucky to be able to work with something I love. I love teaching, supervising students and learning with them, carrying out research that can be applied in resources, cars and situations, participating in fruitful working groups, studying and writing things that are meant to be useful to others. I am very happy to see that the same enthusiasm is also shared by so many experienced and young water professionals. They are the major asset of an organization such as IWA. I understand that this award received by me is conceptually shared with all the members that have pursued a similar pathway of dedication to the environment and to public health, especially in developing countries. Congratulations to IWA for organizing such an important digital congress in spite of all the difficulties being faced now on a worldwide basis. Congratulations also to IWA publishing for the recent initiative of having its journals over access. This fulfills an essential IWA mission of disseminating free knowledge to anyone, anywhere, including people from low and middle income countries who would otherwise be excluded from this. This is very close to my understanding that it is not sufficient to get knowledge. We need to share it. Thank you to my family, to the Federal University of Minas Gerais, a free public university, to my students, to colleagues at research networks with whom I have learned so much. Thank you IWA. To its members, keep working with passion. Their world needs this commitment. Stay well and healthy. Congratulations again to our four outstanding IWA award winners. It's inspiring to see the way they are leading and changing our sector for the better. I would also like to take this opportunity to briefly thank our judges who represented different regions of the world, who came from different sectors and from different backgrounds. Your consideration and rigorous analysis of the submissions must have required a lot of hard work and taken up a lot of your time. So a big thank you from IWA for all your help and support. We really appreciate it. We would now like to introduce you to the program we have prepared for the Virtual Congress. An array of compelling sessions has been prepared for you over the next eight days. This program has been designed by two leaders in the sector and the co-chairs of our program committee. Evelyn Volk, professor at Ghent University in Belgium and Yerd Keller, professor at the University of Queensland Australia. Evelyn has been an active IWA member for almost 20 years and is an expert in biological wastewater treatment. Jörg has also been an active member of our IWA for about 20 years and is the founder of the Advanced Water Management Center at the University of Queensland. They will now take us through the six different themes around which the Congress has been developed. So Jörg and Evelyn, over to you. Thank you Kala, with pleasure. Dear all, we have for you more than 50 technical sessions with over 150 oral presentations by members from all across the world. These sessions are complemented with over 200 poster presentations. The program has been organized into six key thematic areas. You can easily identify these themes or tracks through the different color codes in the program book. The first theme is water utility management. It deals with the water and wastewater infrastructure that constitutes the core of a smart and livable city. Smart utility management is needed to guarantee efficient and even excellent operations. This covers a wide range of actions from infrastructure development for water supply to improvement in public private sector cooperation up to the management of the full urban water cycle. The need to maintain high performance while implementing environmentally sustainable models for water management will affect future developments in water utilities strategies. All of these topics will be covered in this track. Sessions will deal with the management of infrastructure such as collection systems, with condition assessments, with how to make infrastructure resilient to climate change and as a particular focus with digitalization. The second major congress theme is wastewater treatment and resource recovery. Wastewater treatment refers to the biological and or physical chemical treatments to meet the required standards for safe discharge into water bodies such as rivers and lakes. Moreover wastewater is increasingly recognized as a valued source of renewable resources. There is an urgent need to convert wastewater treatment plants into water resource recovery facilities, allowing the recovery of energy and valuable compounds besides the clean water itself. This track will include sessions on specific wastewater treatment processes such as an amok-based nitrogen removal and on specific technologies such as biofilm reactors and membrane reactors. It will cover the saving of energy and chemicals at wastewater treatment plants as well as dedicated resource recovery topics such as the conversion of biosolids to energy and phosphorus recovery. Besides, particular attention will be paid to systems analysis for the impact of microplastics to the removal of microfluidins and pharmaceuticals and to process integration. The importance of digital technologies including modeling and decision support tools will be highlighted as a cross-cutting topic. The third congress theme is drinking water and portable reuse. This track will cover the technical aspects of drinking water production from various sources including groundwater and even seawater to reach high drinking water quality standards. This comprises exploring the full potential of biofiltration methods as well as considering antibiotic resistance and the degradation of pesticides among others. Potable water reuse refers to using treated wastewater as a practical source of drinking water in response to growing pressure on available water resources. The optimization of potable water reuse practices requires effective drinking water production technologies as well as efficient distribution systems. Besides technical aspects, this track will also deal with management and social political aspects as well as the use of digital tools and technologies to facilitate all of this. In sum, the sessions in this track will feed technical, practical and societal discussions on drinking water production. I now gladly hand over the word to Europe who will provide you with more information on the congress themes four to six. Thank you Evelyn and a very warm welcome from myself as well to you all for this first digital World Water Congress. The whole program committee has worked very hard to put an exciting and diverse range of sessions together over these two weeks so we hope that you will find lots of interesting and valuable presentations in these sessions. As Evelyn mentioned I will introduce the remaining three themes in this program all of which are actually will be presented in the second week of this congress. These three themes are mostly focused on broad-ranging cross-sectorial and interdisciplinary aspects of our water sector. Theme four is called city planning and operations and it addresses your various and shared challenges that cities all over the world are facing in terms of climate change, increased urbanization, pressure on resources and rising demands for more liveable cities. Mastering these challenges requires a major shift towards more inclusive and adaptive city planning and urban design processes. Smart, resilient and liveable cities need to be developed in collaborative partnerships between the communities and different professional sectors such as infrastructure developers, transport and other service operators, city planners and obviously water service providers. In this framework digital solutions are key to support the transformation towards improved sustainability, livability and prosperity and hence towards achieving the sustainable development goals. Sessions under this theme cover the increasing importance of nature-based solutions, integrating water management with urban planning, identifying solutions to better manage flood risks and looking at the future of urban drainage systems in a holistic way. The next theme, theme five, is all about communities, communication and partnerships. As we aim to transform our society towards a more sustainable and resilient future, people need to be at the core of all of our activities. The water sector as well as every other sector needs to ensure that societal needs are met and the well-being of the community is the main focus and driver of the decision-making processes. To guarantee this it is crucial to actively engage and communicate with all sectors in our society and we need to ensure that incentives and solutions are fairly distributed among communities. Therefore we have sessions planned that focus on how communities are best engaged in developing and delivering solutions or how different organizations can be brought together under one umbrella to pursue and deliver common goals focusing particularly on the importance of communication. The final theme six covers the water resources and a large-scale water management topic. To maximize the long-term potential of our water resources like groundwater and surface waters we have to carefully manage them in a sustainable way for each situation. This includes the active monitoring of both water quality and quantity, the implementation of appropriate extraction regimes and treatment solutions for compromised water resources. This will help to ensure their long-term availability in an environmentally sustainable way. The sessions in this theme will discuss the pressures on our existing water systems due to aging infrastructure, climate change, population growth and so on. Some innovative solutions will be presented to address drought and flood management and emerging water quality challenges. So there you have it the overview or the six themes of this digital world water congress. We really hope you find these sessions stimulating and informative and that the ideas and solutions will inspire you to actively address your own challenges and opportunities and in doing so move the sector forward to contribute strongly towards achieving the sustainable development goals in the coming years. With that I'm handing you back to Carla for a few additional remarks. Thank you. Thank you Jorg and Evelyn for your excellent overview of the program. We hope you enjoy all the resources the congress puts at your fingertips whether it be the sessions, the free documentaries or the networking opportunities and that the event enables you to learn new ideas and to build new relationships. We invite you to join in our mission to build back better and to make the most of the opportunities created by the challenges this pandemic has brought to our doorstep. We can do this if we do it together. Welcome once more to IWA's first digital water congress. Have a wonderful time and see you shortly for the next sessions. Water. It's vital to human life. The very survival of our planet but water challenges are growing more intense than ever before. But now new technologies are offering bold new ways to protect and optimize water to help the world become water secure and Xylem is leading the way. 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