By Paul Gorman
The world needs to ‘take two steps back’ and look at problems in their broadest context, Seequent Segment Director, Environment, Dr Thomas Krom says.
‘People need to think more holistically. It needs to be a comprehensive solution.’
Krom used wastewater as an example.
‘Wastewater is an oxymoron. You take your wastewater and you treat it – you spend a lot of money treating this water and cleaning it up, and then you throw it away.
‘You should reuse this water. If you don’t want to drink it, at least use it for process water or cooling water or something water. If you put it back in the ground, for groundwater recharge, you reduce subsidence and you can mitigate saltwater intrusion.’
Reduce waste, make things more efficient, and think holistically about problem solving, Krom said.
‘Don’t just think about the pipe network – think about how is the pipe network going to interact with the roads? How is your water supply system going to interact with the roads?
‘If you’re going to build a new road, can you also integrate that into a managed aquifer-recharge project? Under the road you could put drainage boxes, if you know that the geology will let you infiltrate the stormwater, or maybe you could even take your treated wastewater and put it into the systems and use that for aquifer recharge.’
One of the reasons we had to break down the practice of thinking about problems individually was the amount needing to be spent on resilience. The World Bank had estimated up to 70% of that spend needed to be on water, he said.
‘We can’t solve all these problems because we have a shortage of engineers, and most importantly we have a shortage of money and time. Looking at problems in a broader context and taking all the different aspects together, it’s a way to do that. It’s also bringing more people into stakeholder engagement, so we get better decisions.
‘That’s what I call holistic problem solving.’