Taking Climate Action Through Freshwater Innovation: Putting Freshwater Health at the Centre of Solutions and Enterprises
By: Kariann Aarup
Water: the essence of life as we know it. Without water, life is simply not possible. If we stop to think about it, we know this fact. But how often do we consider this essential truth and weave it into our daily lives and all that we do? Based on the 2023 report by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, which predicts that by 2030, our global freshwater demand will exceed global water supply by 40%, the answer is surely “not often enough.” And that must change. Urgently.
That urgency is the raison d’etre behind organizations like AquaAction and its community of 85+ water entrepreneurs who are working to make an impact in watersheds, communities, and local economies across North America.
Building a Community of Water-Focused Enterprises
Established in 2015, in Montréal, AquaAction is a registered charity in both Canada and the United States. Through two complementary tech innovation–focused programs — the AquaHacking Challenge and AquaEntrepreneur — AquaAction spans the full tech development arc from problem definition through ideation, design, and piloting, to implementation and impact.
Clarifying the issue to be solved is the first important step. Water experts bring their problem statement to the AquaHacking Challenge, our startup launchpad, where post-secondary students and early-career professionals ignite their creative spark to brainstorm, design, and develop water-positive solutions. Along their 10-month journey, these young innovators are exposed to the 21st-century skills needed to navigate our complex, interconnected, and climate-impacted world: creativity, collaboration, communications, Indigenous ways of knowing, innovation mindset, and entrepreneurship. A new generation of entrepreneurs is born, one squarely focused on freshwater health. Winners of this competitive program are awarded seed funding, are secured incubation, and turn their ideas into water-positive impact startups.
From the canvas of this startup launchpad program, emerging enterprises embark on their cleantech startup journey. It is arduous at best; it’s personally taxing, financially demanding, and often seemingly impossible. Yet, the future of freshwater depends on turning these innovative ideas and dreams into impactful reality and getting their solutions to market.
AquaAction seeks to help accomplish this through its AquaEntrepreneur program: a tailored scale-up program in which entrepreneurs are matched with specialized coaches to help secure pilot projects or new contracts within the municipal or private sectors. Here, they land a first client or pierce new markets to fast-track getting their solutions into the real world.
Along with the three cohorts of AquaEntrepreneur, the flagship AquaHacking Challenge has been held 14 times since 2015 and has served as a platform for urgent community action in different watersheds across Canada, as well as bi-nationally across the Great Lakes Basin. Through programs like these, emerging startups are tackling a multitude of critical freshwater issues, including microplastics, nutrient loading, blue-green algae, stormwater overflow, invasive species, PFAS, lead contamination, grey water recycling, water-efficiency, rapid legionella detection, closed-loop water systems, and so much more.
These tech-savvy, climate-concerned enterprises are bringing fresh ideas and different perspectives to the world of water. Together, those in the AquaAction community constitute the AquaNation and are creating a wave of positive impact. Economically, they generated over $200 million in revenue in 2023 and raised over $45 million in capital. Socially, they created over 270 jobs in the blue economy and are majority led by female co-founders. Environmentally, they enabled the recycling of 3.6 million litres of water, 90% reduction of groundwater contamination and 80% reduction of freshwater wastage in residential homes, avoided the use of over 1 million plastic water bottles, and restored over 32 acres of wetlands, to mention just a sample of their impact.
Each of these enterprises has a compelling story to tell, but we’ll focus on three to better understand the diversity of their journeys: one tech pivot toward the world of water and with it a deepened sense of purposeful innovation, one born of a deep personal concern for the water quality of their local lake that is now shepherding nation-wide water quality data reporting, and one that is on the verge of transforming a national water advocacy issue into an innovative municipal best practice.
X-TELIA: Tracking and Preventing Residential Water Leakages
Did you know that the average household’s leaks can account for nearly 10,000 gallons of water wasted every year? X-TELIA is bringing its expertise in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, particularly cloud-based networks, low-power wireless sensors, and open data, to help municipal utilities conserve water and reduce demand. With these tech tools, utilities can use real-time data to locate leaks and excessive water use at the source, potentially saving thousands of gallons of costly drinking-quality water.
Founded in 2016 with a mission to help municipalities leverage the emerging power of IoT solutions for many things other than water, X-TELIA came to the AquaEntrepreneur program to pivot to a new market.
Using LoRaWAN (low-power, wide area networking protocol) to wirelessly connect to the internet and manage communication between end-node devices and network gateways, X-TELIA has developed a Smart City application to support a variety of use cases including advanced water metering. Often municipal staff don’t have the tools they need to meet their important water-related goals, such as reducing drinking water waste, detecting water leaks, and reducing emissions. With tools such as hourly meter readings and leak alerts which provide a more detailed picture, X-TELIA’s solutions provide valuable decision-making input and move cities toward their water management goals.
The dynamic and entrepreneurial innovators behind X-TELIA admit that when they started the business, they were mostly excited about the limitless possibilities for IoT technology, but as they learned more about the freshwater issues we are facing, they realized that while it’s cool to build things that are stimulating from a technological perspective, it’s even more motivating to develop solutions that can truly make a difference for the natural world and our communities.
Water Rangers: Empowering Citizens and Reporting on Water Quality Across Canada
Winner of the very first AquaHacking Challenge in 2015, the Water Rangers story starts much earlier, on a freshwater lake with a father who tested water quality every year for 20 years and had a filing cabinet full of data because he cared about his lake and knowing that it was safe. Surely, he was not alone.
The daughter of that father entered the AquaHacking Challenge and developed an easy-to-use handheld water quality test kit and open-source data platform to collect and share water data publicly.
Fast forward nine years, and Water Rangers can proudly say their test kits are used by 300+ community groups in more than 20 countries, they’ve trained more than 25,000 people and have distributed close to 6,000 kits, and their web-based platform hosts more than 200,000 publicly accessible water quality data points.
Water Rangers has actively engaged citizens in Canada and beyond to be informed and engaged freshwater stewards since 2015, and through AquaEntrepreneur, adapted their business model to reach even more municipalities and community groups. They continue to scale their mission-driven ingenuity and, most recently, became the new stewards of Canada’s Watershed Reports. The reports have been a driving force in open data sharing in Canada and the publication of the third Watershed Reports assessment will help Canadians access and understand water health data.
Clean Nature: Real-Time Data for Efficient Road Salt Dispersal, Saving Ecosystems and Money
Did you know that approximately 5 million tonnes of salt are used on winter roads every year in Canada and that of the estimated annual average cost of $12.7 billion, 91% is attributed to maintenance and repair due to excessive road salt, including to public infrastructure, roads, eco-systems, and vehicle corrosion?
In 2019, World Wildlife Canada brought the issue of road salt to the AquaHacking Challenge, and three young women put their skills to work to solve this problem. They developed guiA, an AI-based smart decision-support tool that uses real-time meteorological data and information on road conditions to optimize road salt dispersal while still assuring road safety. This user-friendly, interactive map enables more accurate site-specific decision-making for precision dispersal.
In 2023, their emerging startup, Clean Nature, joined AquaEntrepreneur and secured its first pilot project in partnership with the city of L’Assomption, Québec. Through extensive and careful testing, the solution proved its effectiveness: an approximate 20% reduction in salt use and close to 25% reduction in associated costs.
Deployed at scale, this represents a tremendous amount of positive impact for the health of inland waterways and a major opportunity for process-innovation for those municipalities that embrace it.
Freshwater-Focused Ingenuity in Action
All three stories highlight the potential of human ingenuity to help solve critical water issues. They also demonstrate the value of putting freshwater health at the centre of how a problem is defined to ensure freshwater health is also at the centre of the solutions that are developed. This is freshwater-focused ingenuity in action.
In the context of climate change and the water-scarce future that is predicted, this is the ingenuity urgently needed to make the world better.
Ready to take action for freshwater? We invite organizations and individuals to unleash their eco-centric ingenuity and consider checking out aquaaction.org for the next AquaHacking Challenge and cohort of AquaEntrepreneur in a watershed near them!
Kariann Aarup is the VP of Program Development and Impact at AquaAction.
This story was featured in the Make The World Better Magazine:
