Periscope

Water is our most precious of shared resources and any decision regarding its abstraction, storage and discharge has important implications for all stakeholders both within a given catchment area, and for those within adjoining catchments down-stream. For increasingly water-contingent industry and agriculture, which collectively account for between 80-90% of total accessible freshwater usage on earth, the true scale of the challenge is emerging into sharp focus. As rapid population growth and climate change exert yet more pressure on water demand, the need to make faster, better-informed and more strategic decisions about how we manage water becomes more acute.

Water balance models are currently used by specialists to underpin decisions about the availability of water in the future, and to inform decisions about the adequacy of the infrastructure to manage future supply and demand. These water-balance models are notoriously slow to build, and stakeholder engagement is ineffective. Better decisions require better decision-making tools, available in useful timescales and critically, involving a wide range of stakeholders.

How long does it currently take to reliably and accurately understand and forecast water balance within a given catchment? 6 months? Maybe a year? Sometimes 3 years plus? How does tomorrow sound to you instead?

Yellow Sub Hydro is an integrated catchment scale water balance modelling and stakeholder communication platform. It provides a quick, accurate and flexible way of presenting the complexity of environmental data so that it is both understandable and useful to technical and non-technical users alike. This alone is a huge step forward but it's also just the beginning.

The wider purpose is to help all stakeholders make better, faster and more transparent decisions about water and thereby allow the heaviest consumers (e.g. industry and agriculture) meet their legal, environmental and social obligations whilst also underpinning strategy to meet their practical and financial needs. For heavily regulated and water-intensive industries, where substantial long-term capital investment is essential, such water-balance models are both highly valuable as well as a legal/ regulatory requirement in most cases.