Innovations for Water Management in the Global Drylands
hydrosolutions Ltd., a Swiss-based consulting company, develops and deploys innovative technologies for multi-scale water resources management. These range from the collection of non-traditional data through local involvement to planetary-scale remote sensing and state-of-the-art water balance modeling, including forecasting, for accounting and accountability and the definition of best management strategies and tradeoffs under a changing climate and increasing population pressure.
hydrosolutions Ltd. has a global focus with a large footprint in semi-arid and arid regions where the company has extensive experience in agricultural irrigation water management, among other things. Their solutions are modular, custom-tailored (co-designed with local stakeholders) and based on inter-operable web and mobile communication technologies, thus providing essential building blocks for modern Water Information Systems. This greatly help stakeholders in effective and sustainable resources management and planning with the goal to turn complex development challenges into opportunities for sustained growth.
Publications
riversCentralAsia: An R package to support data pre- and postprocessing for hydrological modelling with RS MINERVE
A comprehensive open-source course for teaching applied hydrological modelling in Central Asia
Monitoring Water for Conservation: A Proof of Concept from Mozambique
Unraveling the Hydrology and Sediment Balance of an Ungauged Lake in the Sudano-Sahelian Region of West Africa using Remote Sensing
Implications of water abstraction on the interconnected Central Rift Valley Lakes sub-basin of Ethiopia using WEAP
Modeling flash floods in ungauged mountain catchments of China: A decision tree learning approach for parameter regionalization
Gap and Opportunity Analysis of Hydrological Monitoring in the Ziway-Shala Sub-basin, Ethiopia
An Unsupervised Classification Algorithm for Multi-Temporal Irrigated Area Mapping in Central Asia
Climate change impacts on summer flood frequencies in two mountainous catchments in China and Switzerland
Water when it Counts: reducing scarcity through Irrigation Monitoring in Central Mozambique
Sustainability
Current action
At hydrosolutions GmbH, sustainability lies at the core of our culture. We perceive ourselves as an integral part of the global society and strive to make meaningful contributions to sustainable development. Our commitment to sustainability is a constantly evolving process. Currently, we place our focus on the following areas:
Improved and transparent water resources management
Our projects actively promote transparency and modernization in water resources management. To gain a better understanding of our approach, we invite you to explore our project site.
Education and nurturing of the next generation of water managers
We supervise master's theses from Switzerland and our project regions. Additionally, we offer internships to talented students. By engaging in knowledge transfer within our projects, we strongly believe in empowering societies and enhancing local capacities.
Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from our work
In our endeavor to assess our environmental impact, we conducted a preliminary analysis of our greenhouse gas emissions. Our largest emissions are primarily attributed to international flights in connection with our projects. To obtain a more accurate estimate of our annual flight-related emissions, we reviewed our activities since 2015 and utilized the CO2 equivalents calculator provided by myclimate.org. On average we emitted 17 ton CO2 equivalents per year between 2015 and 2022. In the years since the Covid-19 crisis, we have moved many meetings online and strived to bundle projects geographically. However, our emissions from flights continue to heavily depend on the structure of the portfolio of projects.
Planned action
Although we have the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) constantly on our radar for our project's impact, we have not yet assessed them in terms of our company’s impact. We are currently measuring hydrosolutions GmbH baseline impact on the sustainable development goals using the impact assessment app by B-Lab and UN Global Compact and plan to set goals to further improve our impact. The results and goals will be published here as we proceed on this journey.
With our current business model, it is not possible for us to reduce 90% of our emissions (as required by the Science-Based Targets initiative). However, we are committed to improve the monitoring of our emissions and to further reduce emissions where we can. In addition, we continue to foster the online meeting culture and build up local capacities in the countries we work in.
