Water, Together is empowering communities to be heroes in their water stories

Water, Together, a documentary by UBC alum and water treatment engineer Dr. Karl Zimmermann, features water stories and perspectives from water leaders worldwide and empowers local communities to lead their own water management solutions through a three-step process: awareness, education and resources.

The film was born during the second part of Zimmermann’s PhD in environmental engineering where he travelled around the world, interviewing community members about the “social side of [their] drinking water systems.”

Recognizing that the typical academic outputs — paywalled scientific papers often in English — would be inaccessible to many of the people and organizations he encountered, such as local NGOs, Zimmermann thought about alternative ways to collect and share stories that could overcome these barriers.

“I didn't know if I could pull off a documentary, but I had a little idea in my mind right at the beginning of the research journey,” said Zimmermann.

He began asking people for permission to film them and recording videos and interviews. The “jumbled up video clips” and “scribbled notes” later became Water, Together, with video editing help from UBC Studios.

In interviewing water leaders across the world, translators played a key role in making the documentary.

“Not only was I learning how to do interviews and how to do qualitative research methods, I was learning how to do that through a translator,” said Zimmermann.

Throughout filming, he learned to be concise when asking questions and built trust with translators to allow for more complete stories from interviewees.

Trust was also crucial for implementing clean water solutions in local communities.

Rather than using what he called an “import model,” where technology for detecting contaminants and filtration is introduced without fostering a partnership, Zimmermann worked directly with community members to raise awareness about contamination in water and incorporate feedback to create culturally relevant safe water solutions.

According to Zimmermann, one of the first steps in implementing clean water solutions in a community is identifying the local contaminants and their impacts on health.

“Iron is invisible. Fluoride is invisible. Bacteria are invisible,” said Zimmermann. “So it's not inherently clear to people that what appears to be clear drinking water isn't necessarily safe, and that clear glass of water could actually be causing the health impacts that they see.”

For example, he described a test to detect iron levels in water using guava, papaya or mango leaves. After putting leaves in water, the mixture would either turn black if the water had iron or green if the water had been filtered with a household sand filter. Visual proof that water was contaminated increased sales and use of biosand filters in these communities.

Biosand filters work fairly simply — beneficial bacteria grow in a column of sand, consuming harmful bacteria while the sand removes iron, contaminants and cloudiness from the water.

By using sand from the Ganges, a river trusted to purify and provide clean water for generations, communities adopted the filter more readily.

In terms of future projects, Zimmerman detailed a desalination project in Madagascar that uses passive solar desalination — a water cycle in a box — rather than conventional desalination, which relies on solar panels, electricity, pumps and reverse osmosis.

The model takes advantage of the heat-absorbing ability of dark-coloured surfaces to evaporate saltwater from the ocean or salty rivers in southern Madagascar, then condense and collect the newly salt-free water for use.

Looking past water quality to water availability, the climate crisis has caused greater disparities, making dry areas drier and exacerbating droughts.

“We used to just try … to make it up by just pumping more water out of the ground. And that leads to land subsidence and it's unsustainable,” said Zimmermann. “By definition, you're pumping out more water than it’s recharging. So we need to look for other, other ways to find water sources.”

Since reducing water consumption on both community and industry levels comes at economic and health costs, Zimmermann pointed to using wastewater, where used water gets treated and recycled, as a possible solution, particularly for use in agriculture.

“Agriculture worldwide uses over 70 per cent of our freshwater extractions … When we extract fresh water that could be used for higher value applications, that's maybe a missed opportunity. Instead, we can use wastewater treated to an appropriate standard and use that to irrigate fields, run industry and use it for cooling water purposes.”

Zimmermann acknowledged public resistance — commonly called the “ick factor” — as a challenge to widespread adoption. Some places, such as Singapore and California, have been making strides in utilizing wastewater, but there’s still a long way to go.

“As climate change affects our water availability, we need to get creative, and not just in the technologies, but also [with] involving people in understanding the problems and understanding the solutions.”

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