The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) selected TIV to Author Article on “Use of 4IR Technologies in Water and Sanitation in Latin America and the Caribbean”

SBAIC Water Energy 4IR

In April of 2020, TIV Members Dr. Mirjana Stankovic, Vice President of Emerging Technologies and Intellectual Property, and Nikola Neftenov, Business Development Associate and IP Researcher, spearheaded a study on The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6) in Latin America and the Caribbean. The investigation highlighted the global problems associated with a lack of clean water access, including the risk of  more than 700 million people being displaced in the next decade due to water scarcity. The motivation of the study came from IADB’s response to the UN’s SDG6 initiative, which called for a “fundamental shift in the way the world looks and manages water”. Although the LAC region has performed above the world’s average in providing basic services to its population, there is still work that can be done. In this case, the IADB sought TIV’s expertise to address future challenges of sanitation, wastewater, solid waste, water-related climate risks and the reduction of resource inequalities in the era of Industry 4.0.  

In response to these challenges, the authors proposed leveraging Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies (4IR) as a potential solution. These technologies have provided new tools to accelerate the progress towards meeting the targets set in the 2030 UN Agenda. The 4IR encompasses a range of new, emerging and disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Drones, and Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR), to name a few. The paper by TIV demonstrates multiple case studies of 4IR in action in the public resource space, including: increasing water utilities’ process efficiency via AI, the use of IoT for environmental monitoring and the use of block-chain to construct decentralized water collection points.