Danish Water Forum annual meeting 2015

Just few days ago, on 29th of January, I gave a presentation at the 9th Annual meeting of the Danish Water Forum (DWF). The meeting took place in one of the auditoriums of Copenhagen University. The take home message from my presentation was “There is a great potential for Danish studies focusing on the beneficial effects of drinking water quality.” All presentations from the event will be uploaded to the home page of the DWF (click here) and most probably I’ll also upload mine to the university profile.

As I see it, the annual meetings of DWF are networking events, where people from R&D companies, the state and local authorities, and the universities meet together to share knowledge… or information on ongoing projects and initiatives. There is usually an international participation too, so the official language is English.

This year there were more than 100 participants and the topic was “Research and technology development and current practice in relation to Danish groundwater based sustainable water supply as a world leading expertise.”

Few of the topics that were discussed:

• Alternatives to groundwater based water supply: challenges & solutions – main focus on water reuse
• The water supply in Reykjavik – hot, cold water, heating, thermal energy production… very interesting overview on the water supply system and the unique challenges they face
• The China Europe Water Partnership and few other presentations on the Danish Water Partnership with China – lots of effort is put at political level, so the Chinese market opens to Danish water companies. China is ready to spend billions for improving the water quality (and not only) as their 15 year program is quite optimistic and they are searching for European partners, who are willing to sell know-how.
• Grundfos presented one of their products – Lifelink – mobile based water dispenser for point sources of potable water. There were two things from this presentation that made me stop for a while and think. The first one was “the access to water is a human right, not the use of water. Which, I think, means that “yes, you have the right to access of safe water, however you still should pay for using it”. I haven’t followed the debate on the right to safe water, but I should! The second thing was: “Grundfos is a commercial company with a social purpose”.
• SkyTem presented their corporate strategy and gave some numbers on revenue. The national groundwater mapping in Denmark started in 1998 and will finish in 2015. SkyTem is now an internationally successful company, which started because of the Danish groundwater mapping program (Aarhus University has a role in that too). Last year 100% of their revenue come from abroad. 60% from mineral exploration, 30% from water and environment, 5% from geotechnical, and 5 % from oil&gas exploration.
• “Danish groundwater bodies and their chemical status” was a presentation from GEUS on the legal frame in which the Danish groundwater monitoring is operating… i.e. why some things are done as they are

There were many more talks, but these were the ones which left the strongest impression on me.

Additional links somehow connected to DWF:

• State of green – tours tailored to the specific needs of clients
• Denmark knows water and Rethink Water
• House of water with a nice TEDxCopenhagen talk