Healthy Water Cycles Challenge

City: Leeuwarden
Country: The Netherlands
Date: 21 October - 31 May

Will you be the changemaker and win the prize? – With the world’s growing population, the demand for healthy freshwater is increasing while on the other hand, availability is decreasing. Only 2.5% of earth’s water is freshwater, pollutants are increasingly difficult to remove, water is unevenly distributed and we have more extreme droughts and rains due to climate change.

The Challenge

So, this challenge is to find innovative solutions for providing sufficient and good quality (drinking) water and/or reuse for people, neighborhoods, cities, agriculture, the environment and/or for industry, worldwide!

We need your brains, ideas and skills to come up with technologies, awareness raising, and sustainable solutions to guarantee enough high quality water for everyone: hence, solutions for creating a healthy water cycle.

With your contribution, you can make a difference when it comes to securing our water supply and contributing to a healthy natural water cycle. For now and in the future. And oh yes, there are also fun prizes to be won.

How to participate?

Describe in up to 300 words, illustrated or not, what world water problem you want to tackle and how you are planning to do it, or create an elevator pitch video of up to 2 minutes describing your idea/concept. You can do this individually or in a team of no more than 5 bachelor students, preferably from different programs. E-mail your idea/concept as MS Word .doc or as YouTube link to: Koos Oosterhaven no later than October 21, 2022. A team of experts will review all entries and let you know if yours is eligible to participate in the challenge. Individual entries will be combined into teams as much as possible by mutual agreement. Shortly after submission, teams will be brought together for the first Masterclass where you will hear more about the next steps.

This challenge covers many disciplines e.g. water (sources, technology, quality, management), soil, food, health, environment, climate adaptation, sustainable entrepreneurship, marketing & economics. Idea: you can try to fit this into your current curriculum: a module, a minor or spend your thesis on this important topic and make the change. Read more…