A two-day summit on water is being organised by the UAE’s Ministry of Water & Environment, the Arab Water Council and IQPC, a provider of knowledge-driven conferences, on October 13 and 14 in Dubai.

The WaterTech conference will gather regional and international water resource and infrastructure management experts to discuss and debate on the priced natural resource.

Top of the agenda are national and international case studies aimed at successfully evaluating groundwater resources using GIS and geophysical techniques, along with the UAE’s dam management projects, strategies to date, and their success.

In the last three decades, rapid population growth and accelerated socio-economic development in the GCC countries have added to water demands, which have escalated from less than 5 billion cubic metres in 1970 to about 26.778 billion cubic metres in 2005, said an official.
 
Due to the deterioration of non-renewable aquifers, all GCC countries rely on the desalinated water as a main source for domestic water supply.

'The WaterTech conference is a good opportunity to connect with water management experts, discuss important water-related issues and challenges facing the region, and hopefully also distill down the mitigation measures that need to be taken,' said Kelly Grant, event director at IQPC Middle East.

'The Middle East is facing a water resource problem that is one of the biggest in the world. The level of available renewable water in the region is predicted to be one fifth of what the rest of the world enjoys. Despite this, the UAE is one of the world’s largest water users.'

'Apart from successful case studies, WaterTech will look at planning, design and implementation of transmission and distribution infrastructure to cope with future demands; the prospect of wastewater as a sustainable resource using water minimization technologies into new housing developments,' added Grant.-TradeArabia News Service