Why WATEC?
The issue of water and environmental technologies is gaining an increasingly central place in the world’s consciousness and economy. About 2 billion people around the world either lack access to sufficient quantities of water, or are supplied with water unfit for drinking. This shortage is going to worsen in the near future due to the rise of world’s population and to the redistribution of water recourses among the world’s regions, which in turn stems from the global warming.
This global warming phenomenon, which the leading experts attribute to the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from burning fossil fuels for energy generation, presents a multifaceted hazard to the mankind. Its consequences include water shortages in certain regions combined with floods and other natural disasters in other parts of the world; glacier melting in polar areas fraught with catastrophic flooding across many countries and the loss of vast habitable territories; widespread famine and lack of basic supplies – and other calamities, some of them predictable and others still beyond our cognition.
Industrial and vehicular air pollution results in heavy health problems both around the world and in our small Israel. Regions susceptible to air pollution owe many unnecessary deaths to this cause.
The growing environmental awareness has resulted in an impressive boost in the development of new technologies for alleviating ecological problems, particularly for water purification and treatment, and in the corresponding increase of these technologies’ worldwide implementation and marketing. The Kyoto Protocol on diminishing the greenhouse gases emission has set up an emission trading market, with a current volume of $22 billion and rapidly growing up.
The world water market stands today at approximately $504 billion, while other environmental technologies account for a further $200 billion.
Non-polluting alternative energy sources have become one of the world’s hottest issues. Such sources include solar radiation; wind; biomass; urban and rural waste; using agricultural production for making such liquid fuels as bio-ethanol and bio-diesel; geothermal sources. In the future this list might be augmented with the energy of sea tides and other natural phenomena, and all together they are poised to replace our traditional oil and coal fuel.
WATEC 2007 is intended to display such technologies, emphasizing those developed in Israel, and to allow anyone interested to learn more about innovation, creativity and experience in solving environmental problems, in rich and poor countries alike.