UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan has unveiled a $150 million initiative to address global water scarcity by launching the XPRIZE Water Scarcity competition.
XPRIZE competition
The competition will be held through a partnership between the Mohamed bin Zayed Water Initiative and XPRIZE, with a total cash prize of $119 million.
The partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation, a leader in designing, launching, and implementing large-scale competitions, aims to boost innovation by incentivizing crowd-sourced, scientifically viable solutions to create a more equitable future for all.
The five-year global competition targets to encourage innovators worldwide to focus on transforming the reliability, affordability, and sustainability of water desalination technologies.
“The solutions that currently exist to address the water scarcity crisis are not sufficient to prevent a range of unacceptable scenarios from occurring. New solutions are therefore urgently required,” said Mohamed bin Zayed Water Initiative Chairman Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
The Mohamed bin Zayed Water Initiative is part of a wider UAE-led effort to tackle global water scarcity, which included the publication of a detailed discussion paper on the subject in September 2023, entitled “Ripple Effect: Water Scarcity – The Hidden Threat to Global Security and Prosperity.”
News Peg
Last December, the UAE called for a coordinated international response to the threat of global water scarcity in a comprehensive discussion paper. The paper included how global water scarcity does not currently receive the same public attention and financial investment as other risks, such as climate change and future pandemics.
Big numbers
2 billion: That’s the total number of people who lack access to clean and safe drinking water across the globe, and approximately 3.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation services, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE).
Water cooperation
At the COP28 climate summit in December last year, the UNECE urged that water cooperation must remain at the core of climate action to address security and health risks.
“Climate change is already having huge impacts on water resources, which for 153 countries worldwide are shared with their neighbors,” UNECE Executive Secretary Tatiana Molcean told the COP28 summit in the UAE.
Source: Forbes
