Fresh water for everyone
About 2.1 billion people lack safely managed drinking water, and groundwater, rivers and glaciers are under growing strain.
Open in the interactive tree →Fresh water is plentiful overall but not where people live, and drinking water needs treatment and pipes. Desalination, reuse and water from air can add supply, but all cost energy and money and leave waste streams. The hardest part is often delivery: reaching the poorest and the fragile regions reliably and affordably.
As of October 2026
WHO and UNICEF's 2025 report counts 2.1 billion people, about one in four, without safely managed drinking water, including 106 million who drink untreated surface water. WMO's report of 17 September 2026 says nearly two thirds of monitored wells in 2025 were outside their historical norm, glaciers lost about 1,400 gigatonnes of water in 2023 to 2025 and river flow was among the driest in 35 years. Desalination supplies about 99 million cubic metres a day (2023) from roughly 16,800 plants (2020 count), using about 3 to 5.5 kWh of electricity per cubic metre for seawater reverse osmosis against a theoretical floor near 1 kWh, and its brine discharge reportedly exceeds the fresh water produced. The next UN Water Conference is due in Abu Dhabi in December 2026, co-hosted by the UAE and Senegal.
What is missing
- Desalination and reuse that approach the energy floor and handle brine safely
- Cheap, reliable water systems for villages and fragile regions far from the grid
- Accurate knowledge of how much groundwater is left; Africa and Asia are the least observed regions
- Less loss from leaking and unmetered networks, which the World Bank once put at US$14 billion a year for utilities
- Money and governance to build and run services; fragile contexts lag by 38 percentage points
Becomes possible once solved
- Safe water at home for all
- Fewer water-borne illnesses
- Less time spent fetching water
- More stable farming and food supply in dry regions
Open steps
- Desalination near the energy floor Medium AI leverageCut seawater desalination energy from today's 3 to 5.5 kWh per cubic metre toward the near 1 kWh floor and handle the brine, with better membranes and solar or waste-heat supply.
- Water from air in dry places High AI leverageMake sorbent materials and devices that harvest drinking water from air at low humidity with solar heat, and prove them at village scale.
- Stop losing treated water Medium AI leverageFind and fix leaks, theft and metering errors in pipe networks and reuse wastewater, so water already treated reaches customers.
- Know how much groundwater is left High AI leverageCombine sparse well records, satellite data and flow models to map aquifers and their decline, especially in Africa and Asia where observations are thin.
- Reach the unserved Low AI leverageBuild and run safe water services in poor, rural and fragile regions, where safely managed coverage is 38 percentage points lower than elsewhere.
Where AI could help
Low AI leverage. The main gaps are money, pipes and governance; AI helps at the margins with materials, leak finding and groundwater mapping.
- Screening membranes and sorbents for desalination and air-water harvesting
- Mapping groundwater from sparse wells and satellites
- Finding leaks in pipe networks from pressure and flow data
Shown so far
- In 2023 a fine-tuned GPT model proposed new linker molecules for aluminium MOFs that were then synthesized; the ten frameworks reached water uptake up to 0.64 g per g across 13 to 53 percent humidity (JACS, 2023). source
- In January 2026 Princeton researchers published a 30-metre map of US groundwater depth, built with a random-forest model trained on more than one million well measurements (Communications Earth & Environment). source
Prerequisites
- Aqueducts & Public Water~312 BCPiped public water for whole cities began with Roman aqueducts
- Earth observation by satellite1960
- GRACE Gravity Satellites2002GRACE shows falling groundwater in major aquifers, the strain this problem faces
- Solar Boom & Price Collapse2015–2026
- SWOT Wide-Swath Water Survey2022
- MOFs: Chemistry Nobel 20252025