Over the past five decades, the GCC countries have witnessed an unprecedented and sustained economic and social transformation, which has been associated with one of the world’s highest population and urbanization growth rates, coupled with rapidly changing lifestyles and consumption patterns. Such transformation has been associated with a rapid increase in sectoral water requirements that goes beyond their limited available freshwater resources.

Although the GCC countries are situated in one of the most water-scarce regions of the world with an extremely poor endowment of freshwater resources, they have done well in the provision of water supply to their populations primarily by relying on desalination technology, which is made possible by their strong economies and substantial financial and energy resources. Currently, a safe, affordable, and stable domestic water supply has been established in each country covering 100% of its population. However, municipal water supply systems are associated with substantial financial, economic, and environmental costs.

On the other hand, agricultural water demands, representing about 80% of the total water requirements in the GCC countries, have been met mainly by heavy groundwater abstraction, and to a lesser extent by treated municipal wastewater. However, a major concern is that the majority of these groundwater resources are non-renewable, are being extensively mined, and are rapidly depleting, while the remaining limited and renewable groundwater resources are being over-exploited beyond their replenishment rates, leading to their quality degradation due to saltwater intrusion.

In the past decades, to address the water sector challenges the GCC countries have been focusing on a supply-side management approach to meet the ever-increasing demands for water, manifested by the construction of desalination plants, dams, systems for groundwater abstraction, and reuse of treated wastewater. Recently, the countries have complemented this traditional approach by a demand-side management approach utilizing structural, sociopolitical, and economic policy tools to influence demand and achieve water use efficiency in the various consuming sectors.

Within the GCC countries’ efforts to achieve effective water resources management, technology can play a major part as an enabler for both supply-side engineering measures and demand-side management and efficiency measures. The implementation of technology in the GCC countries’ water management system has been more focused on the supply-side engineering measures and operation, and less on the demand and efficiency measures. Examples of these are technologies used to produce fresh and clean water (e.g., desalination and wastewater treatment technologies), and mathematical models that facilitate decision-making in the planning, management and optimal operation of water resources systems (e.g., simulation models for groundwater and surface water systems). The supply and demand systems can be better considered holistically both for longer-term planning and real-time operations facilitated by technology.

Recently, new generation of technologies, driven by the developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs), have been emerging providing powerful enabling tools for effective water management. Examples of these are smart water management technologies relying on ICTs to provide real-time, automated data to resolve water challenges, as well as for planning and operational purposes; e.g., SCADA in water supply, modern in-situ sensors and earth observation, improved metering and billing systems, or creation of “digital twins” of facilities/systems. Other examples include smart agriculture using sensors for data acquisition, transmission and presentation, and hydroinformatic systems which integrate numerical modeling and data science methods in a digital environment (typically GIS and cloud computing to facilitate data management, analytics, and visualization) that facilitate the conversion of data into information, subsequently into knowledge, and eventually management decisions.

As we stand on the brink of a technological revolution, i.e., the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter and transform entire systems of production, management, and governance, it is expected that technology will have an impact on the entire water sector and its management-related activities. The current plethora of data coming from all types of devices together with the escalating increase in computer capacity is revolutionizing almost all sectors. The water sector system will not be an exception. For example, in the municipal water supply sector, combining the power of big data analytics, including Artificial Intelligence, with existing and future urban water infrastructure represents a significant untapped opportunity for the operation, maintenance, and rehabilitation of urban water infrastructure to achieve economic and environmental sustainability. Similarly, in agricultural water management, adopting smart water management systems, where sensors measure soil moisture in real-time and automatically irrigate the field without human intervention provide a major opportunity to enhance irrigation efficiency and optimize water use.

There will be a need for stocktaking of these modern innovations, explore their current adoption in the GCC countries, and explore policy, institutional, and technical facilitation of these technologies to improve overall water management and sustainability in the region.

The WSTA Fifteenth Gulf Water Conference advocates harnessing the potential of technologies in both the supply-side and demand-side management areas to achieve effective water management in the GCC countries. It promotes the exchange of experiences and discussion on the benefits, costs, risks, required human capacities, and barriers faced in their implementation.