Keith White, CEO of Ambient Water Corporation, spoke with Group Associate Editor Robyn Tucker about how state infrastructure and municipalities create unique water challenges for the U.S., and why desalination may not be the answer for every region’s water crisis.
"By the year 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in severely water-stressed conditions due to a number of factors," says White.
White discusses how water challenges are growing, and what kinds of strategies are appropriate for solving them. Water scarcity, he notes, is contributed to by a plethora of causes, including population growth, inadequate government support and environmental issues. The U.S. has unique challenges because of people’s reliance on public water supplies in the face of aging, government-supplied infrastructure.
“General human nature is to be in denial until the problem comes up and slaps you in the face, and that’s true with the looming water crisis," adds White. This statement, he says, has rung true in the Flint, Michigan, water crisis.
Proper solutions for the water crisis rely on accurate data to determine which technologies should be used, whether the answer is filtration, desalination or atmospheric water generation.
