Australia and Israel are at once similar and different in the way they handle water management, but as digitisation disrupts water technology both countries must make their water systems more cyber resilient.
Israeli water management expert Raanan Adin, who is chairman of the Israel Water Association and chief executive of water security and treatment consultancy AH Water Consulting, says that the water management sector as a critical infrastructure has arrived late to digitisation – and all of the complexity that comes with it.
Mr Adin spoke on a Water Resilience and Innovation panel at the virtual Australia Israel Innovation Summit in October and gave an exclusive interview to InnovationAus following the event.
Both Australia and Israel are knowledge-driven when it comes to water management practices. In both countries Mr Adin said there is a lot of water management knowledge floating around, both in the public and private sectors.
“Starting from academies and research institutions and going through technological companies, consulting, planning and design. There is a lot of attention and awareness in government, regulators and environmental health authorities. Everybody is aligned around the fact that water is an important resource that needs to be well managed.”
The roots of Israel’s holistic approach to water management stem from the country’s first water laws, legislated in the 1950s, soon after Israel achieved statehood in 1948.
Read the article by David McClure in InnovationAus.