Environmental Sustainability
Challenges
Water Security and Environmental Sustainability
Water crises are intensifying both in frequency and severity. Kestrel, whose solutions combine technology and methods for knowledge-based decision-making, and True Elements, a pioneer in water intelligence that clarifies water complexity for decision-makers, are joining with Imaginet, a leading IT systems integrator and managed network provider, to enable communities and agencies to realize water resilience in the face of climate pressures. Key metrics include United Nations SDG6 (Sustainable Development Goals – Clean Water and Sanitation) as well as other SDG’s benefiting from healthier and cleaner water.
The Challenge - Advancing Climate Change Resiliency
Climate change is driving new and necessary approaches to future planning for governance. The direct correlation to climate change and the water landscape in highly impactful to events today as well as the future. Floods, droughts, storms all impact public well-being and economic health both present and future. Furthermore, the increasing ratio of population to available fresh water compels action for preserving basic needs and security.
Water science is following carbon science, but is the pre-eminent impact factor from climate change. Water movement drives flooding, water scarcity impacts agriculture, water contamination impacts health, productivity and quality of life. It is a strategic governance imperative to plan for dynamics of climate impact with respect to water.
The Need - Understanding the Water Landscape
The most important factor in addressing water security is knowledge. The scale of the problem and timescales involved for response, mitigation and planning requires understanding to maximize resources. This knowledge is more diffuse, multi-variate and less predictable than a more focused engineering problem, such as building a levy or drainage canal. The challenge is WHERE to build a drainage canal, HOW BIG it should be and WHY build a drainage canal as opposed to some other measure.
Knowledge is needed for both near term events such as seasonal storms and long term events, such as not only droughts, but how to recover from them. Resources are limited and they must be optimally allocated and applied. The more fuller the understanding of a water environment and it’s behavior, the more effectively the applied measures will be, thus resources are greatly multiplied from an operational perspective.
Solutions
A Realistic Water Universe
A comprehensive mathematical model that reflects the physical reality of a water environment can provide the knowledge for planning. It allows assessment from storm flow impacts, it provides for response to movement of contamination and pollution and it helps provide forecasting options broadly incorporating climate change science and its impact on regional environment.
Such a model will have as it’s foundation the hydrology of a country or region, and will ingest and fuse the available information and, crucially, update the information to progressively improve the model over time, as models of this complexity will always be evolving. Finally a method or process is needed for leveraging this knowledge across the action spectrum, whether it is incident response or information integration or policy implementation.
The Technology - Comprehensive Digital Simulation for Knowledge and Action
True Elements is a global leader with a uniquely evolved capability; this capability provides a dynamic knowledge tool that supports response assessment and forecasting across the water impact space. It is a fusion of diverse information that is processed for ingestion into a mathematical representation of water environment, including flows, watersheds, terrains and measurements. This information is transformed by a synchronized data architecture incorporating machine learning with artificial intelligence and first principles models.
Weather forecasts, geospatial and administrative boundaries, hydrological properties, soil characteristics and aquifers all combine to create and digital twin of watersheds. The result environment meets the requirement of the water challenge and includes trajectories for the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) range of futures.
Kestrel Technology Group is a leading provider of knowledge management technology for field operations, notably the Field Information Support Tool or FIST. FIST is proven in vital operations throughout the ASEAN region of countries, including Thailand. FIST has largely operated in austere environments the require robust communications that can operate anywhere and anytime, regardless of public communication infrastructure. It is used in a range for geospatial information processes including maritime security, storm response, disaster management, sensor fusion, public health, research and environmental security. In summary, the system has both reach and range across any field operation requirement.
Policy intent across the enterprise space is executed via interagency fusion and standard operating procedures. FIST has a composable architecture that can place servers in agencies or remote areas that can act as a part of a unified FIST environment. This environment also can perform data exchange with existing systems to implement multiagency policies. These policies are coupled to standard operational workflows that provide means to execute data collections, track real-time activity, integrate sensors and do so in a flexible data permission environment that allows virtually any combination of users and data group access.
Imaginet International Inc. is a supplier of mission critical network architectures for Philippine military, security, and civilian agencies as well as industry. These architectures enable Interagency fusion with efficient access policies with accredited cyber security. Additionally, disaster recovery, communications bandwidth management, preventive maintenance and incident response are integrated into enterprise processes to achieve access, reliability, and scale for combined systems.
The Benefits
The True Elements, Kestrel and Imaginet solution is a leading- edge approach to address the crucial issue of water management. This issue is at the top of the list in terms of environmental criticality and its importance cannot be overstated. The team is both proven in science and operations and can provide the knowledge foundation for allocation of resources and their optimal implementation and effective execution.
Governments and industry can meet their climate change challenges with a comprehensively conceived approach. The approach uniquely tracks the global body of climate projection science, high resolution environment simulation and an enterprise operation capability that can provide interagency scope across response, assessment and planning activities to turn the knowledge into effective policy.