Following the talk we had from WWF the week before, our class came together this week to discuss about our research topic and how we were going to do our research. Many of us saw the need to re-look into our prior research topic: NEWater in Singapore and the technology behind NEWater, due to the fact that the topic was vague and would not fully explain the inherent difficulties of water sustainability that we face today.
As such, we decided to look into the various areas that we needed to address when questioning the concept of water sustainability. Particularly the ideas of whether water scarcity was evident in developing countries, what measures have been taken by these countries to ensure that their people have a constant supply of water, and how successful these methods were. Of course, we also had to constantly hold the need for a global perspective into account. Upon deciding on this, we then proceeded to formulate our new research topic: What is the most effective method of ensuring water sustainability?
Following this, we then chose three developing countries, Singapore, Japan and Canada, for our analysis and evaluation. The path of our research would be to look into a general overview how these countries ensure water sustainability. This means the analysis of an array of methods such as desalination and reverse osmosis.
Finally, we will evaluate their methods based on:
1. Cost effectiveness
2. Eco-friendliness
3. Resources
The class split into smaller groups for more efficient research to be done on the individual country. Each group was assigned to research on either one of the countries.
For Singapore, the group has learnt about how NEWater benefits Singapore and how it functions, bringing maximum efficiency as one of the new major water supplier for Singapore. It is cost-effective on a long-term basis and it is quite eco-friendly. However, more can be done to increase the public acceptance towards drinking water that’s processed.
For Japan, the group has summarised and listed the pros and cons of the seawater desalination process used there. They have come to the conclusion that this process is sustainable in the long run, and that it is space-efficient and eco-friendly.
However, the cost of it is a problem as much investment is needed for it to be built and maintained.
With that, we will come to collate and finalise the information to produce the final product before the presentation(:
Where we can progress from here:
In view of the class’ progress for the past week where we established a sound ground for our research topic with significant depth and content shown from our research, we could still continue progressing in terms of our research contents and organisation of ideas. Firstly, we could do a comparison across the various countries on how feasible and how effective the various methods the countries uses in the provision of water. This can be done through comparing statistics i.e. costs, % of water provision, eco friendliness of methods, projected no. of years of sustainability of such a method etc. Through such comparison, we can attain a rough global perspective towards this issue by observing the various trends and pertaining problems that other countries face. In addition, we could also see the learning points of countries who seem to have a relatively secure water supply, in comparison to those who have an unstable supply of water and what kinds of methods they could adopt/ implement. Such comparison would also make us critically aware of the different kinds of challenges (in this case, water sustainability) foreign governments face, and the decisions they would have to make in ensuring a better quality of life for their people.
In conclusion, week 2 had been an extremely fruitful and insightful week, besides beginning on research for our topic, we also started to delve deeper into issues of water sustainability from a global perspective. Seeing all the efforts and ideas we have for this topic, we certainly hope that the delivery of the presentation next week would be both insightful and educational to the rest!
Jamie, Juliana, Melanie
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