Twenty three technical sessions, 240 oral and poster presentations, three-day-long workshops, 1,350 delegates from approximately 60 countries, concurrent exhibition spread over 2,000 square metres showcasing the latest equipment and technology from 67 participating companies - that’s IDA World Congress 2009 statistics in a nutshell | more »

Non-technical sessions tend to provide a welcome break in overwhelmingly technical seminars. Thus I came to be at two finance sessions last year, one at the IDA Desalination Congress in November and the second one at the MEED Wastewater Conference in December, with both looking at the future of privatisation in the Middle East’s water sector in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The key takeaway was that only properly structured projects, in correctly unbundled sectors, backed by financially solid sponsors, and (surprisingly) government support stood a decent chance of getting project finance | more »

2009 is turning out to be an unkind one on the rainfall front. Australia’s drought seems an old tale with more countries reporting failure of seasonal rains. India, among the most populous nations in the world and dependent on rain-fed irrigation, reportedly received only a third of the expected rainfall. At the other extreme, there has been massive flooding in central and southern Europe and in China, uprooting communities, destroying infrastructure and killing people and livestock. Scientists have blamed climate change and the El Nino phenomenon for the extreme variations in rainfall | more »

Here is a tale, founded on several assumptions, of leakage gone awry. Our first assumption is a leakage loss of 18 to 20 per cent in the water distribution system of a city, somewhere in the GCC. The second assumption is that we are producing 540 MIGD of water; the loss due to leakage in the given scenario would be approximately 100 MIGD. | more »