Kala Vairavamoorthy reflects on IWA’s recent Water and Development Congress & Exhibition, where the Asian Development Bank’s Asian Water Development Outlook 2025 report was launched.
During our recent Water and Development Congress & Exhibition in Bangkok, the launch of the Asian Development Bank’s Asian Water Development Outlook (AWDO) 2025 became a focal point for many of the conversations we shared across sessions, hallways, and into the evenings. As I listened to the debates and reflections throughout the week, I kept returning to the same question: What does all this mean for the future of our sector? On the flight home from Bangkok, I felt compelled to pull these thoughts together, not only as a response to the report itself, but as a reflection on what it revealed about the future we, at IWA, are collectively shaping.
As the latest in a series started in 2007, AWDO 2025 offers governments, development banks and policymakers an invaluable, evidence-rich overview of where Asia stands. This edition charts a 12-year trajectory of water security, showing that 2.7 billion people have moved out of extreme water insecurity since 2013, largely through gains in basic rural water supply. At the same time, it highlights that around 4 billion people remain vulnerable, not because infrastructure is absent, but because service quality, environmental deterioration and climate exposure continue to undermine reliability and resilience. The report highlights the difficulties of ageing and overstressed urban infrastructure, the limited availability of reliable data, the degradation of ecosystems, weak environmental governance – fragmented governance and lack of coordination is mentioned repeatedly – and the growth in exposure to floods and droughts.
Across the 49 countries it covers, AWDO shows a highly diverse landscape: some middle-income economies consolidating gains in water security, small island and fragile states grappling with existential climate and water risks, and several countries where progress on governance and environmental health is lagging behind service expansion. The report’s estimate that the region will require $4 trillion in WASH investment by 2040, while current spending meets only 40% of that need, is a stark reminder of the scale of the challenge. The report also further refines indicators on governance, environmental health, inclusion and resilience, and brings new thematic insights on issues such as cryosphere change, water investment gaps, and the gendered dimensions of heat and water stress.
These are important and timely contributions. But as I absorbed the findings in Bangkok, another realisation grew stronger: AWDO tells us where we are, but it speaks less to what we must become. The report identifies the symptoms, but it explores less the many solutions already emerging across Asia, and the innovations being developed and deployed by utilities, regulators, researchers, technology providers, social enterprises, start-ups and practitioners – many of them from across our IWA community that are already demonstrating what a new normal could look like.
I can say this with conviction, as one of the most powerful aspects of the Congress was the sheer number of concrete examples on display from across the region. When we share real case studies with communities and decision-makers, something powerful happens: the potential of an intervention suddenly becomes tangible. So, while abstract global problems and broad solutions often feel distant, the moment people hear a story rooted in their own region, the view in the room shifts. It is in those moments that light bulbs go on and momentum starts to build.
Shining such a light on possibilities is important. What struck me throughout the Congress was that the gaps AWDO describes cannot be closed by scaling the same models that built the systems we have today. The future will require a different way of imagining, designing and delivering water and sanitation services – one that is more circular, more distributed, more digitally enabled, and more deliberate about how we use, manage and reuse every drop.
Where AWDO 2025 meets IWA’s innovation agenda
We can see these possibilities across our sector, and what became clear throughout the week in Bangkok was how strongly the discussions across Congress – from our technical sessions, Utility Forum, Utility Leaders Summit, and Inclusive Urban Sanitation Forum, right up to the High-Level Summit – echoed the gaps and opportunities that surfaced in AWDO. More than this, it became clear how many of those gaps our community is already moving to close.
Whether it is in advanced leakage detection, pressure management, robotics-assisted inspections, digital twins, non-sewered sanitation, modular treatment units, or nature-based approaches to urban drainage, IWA members are redefining what modern water and sanitation systems can look like. When these innovations were presented in Bangkok, rooted in the realities of local cities, utilities and environments – the effect was dramatic. The solutions stopped feeling abstract. People recognised their own landscapes, their own challenges, their own possibilities. Local case studies turned possibility into credibility and this credibility, in turn, generates the momentum needed to secure change.
Wastewater offers one of the clearest illustrations of this shift. Across Asia, the sector is evolving from a paradigm of ‘treat and discharge’ to one of ‘transform and recover’. Wastewater is increasingly seen not as a liability, but as a reservoir of water, nutrients, carbon and critical minerals – a view fully aligned with AWDO’s message that infrastructure investment alone will not close the region’s water security gaps. Instead, the region needs new business models, diversified revenue streams and utilities capable of generating value from what once was discarded.
Recent examples across the region demonstrate the potential of this transition and the complexity of sustaining it. On a recent visit to China, I saw this first hand. In Zhengzhou, a one-million-cubic-metre-per-day facility integrates advanced treatment with sludge pyrolysis, gasification, anaerobic digestion and solar power. Around 40% of its energy demand is met through renewables, and reclaimed water supports one of the largest water-source heat pump systems in the world. In Beijing’s Tongzhou District, I visited the underground Bishui Reclaimed Water Plant, which reuses 100% of its output for river replenishment, irrigation and street cleaning, blending urban design with circular water thinking. And last year in Karnataka, new legislation allowing apartment complexes to sell up to 50% of their treated wastewater opened the door to a functioning non-potable reuse market and strengthened incentives to properly operate 2500 decentralised systems in Bengaluru.
Reuse, more broadly, captures the mindset change under way. Cities and industries generate nearly one billion cubic metres of wastewater each day, yet only a fraction is reused and made potable, while industrial reuse accounts for barely 3% of withdrawals. The principle that different uses require different qualities of water came up repeatedly in Bangkok. So, while drinking water must be pristine, water for cooling, flushing, agriculture, and many industrial processes can be served by alternate grades.
Asia is already showing what this can look like in practice. At the utility and city scale, Singapore’s national ‘four taps’ initiative treats reclaimed water (NEWater) as a core source, and Chennai’s six-pot (Aaru Kudam) framework includes producing reverse osmosis-grade water for industry, and water treated through ultrafiltration for lake recharge and indirect potable use – illustrating how multiple grades can be integrated into a single system. Manila is preparing to incorporate direct potable reuse into its long-term plans, as part of its drive to strengthen resilience in a water-stressed metropolis. At the industrial end, Bangladesh’s garment and manufacturing zones are beginning to integrate shared treatment and reuse into their growth model, using centralised facilities to secure reliable water for production. These developments show how integrated, resilient portfolios are beginning to emerge.
Digitalisation is another area where AWDO’s diagnosis meets the sector’s emerging capabilities. Across Asia, utilities are deploying smarter networks that support better day-to-day decisions. Digital twins, real-time sensors and predictive analytics are helping operators see their systems more clearly. Pumps, valves and controllers are becoming intelligent actors that adjust performance autonomously and reduce leakage long before failures become visible. Yet the biggest shift comes from unlocking the intelligence that utilities already hold. Dashboards reflect only a small share of available data. The rest, including handwritten logs, SCADA histories, contractor notes, customer complaints, photos and the practical knowledge of field crews, remains an unopened library of insight.
Generative AI, especially retrieval-augmented approaches, can finally read this library and bring together information that used to sit in separate places. This is most visible in pipe condition assessment, where AI combines hydraulic behaviour, field observations, contractor workmanship, weather stress and customer feedback to build a clear picture of risk and help utilities anticipate bursts before they happen. In a region where many utilities struggle with limited staff and complex systems, these tools can democratise expertise and act as a capability multiplier, turning scattered information into clear and practical guidance.
Nature-based solutions are another area of rising relevance and growing complexity. They support flood management, urban cooling, source protection, and even wastewater treatment and reuse, and they tend to earn strong public support. Yet their performance can be variable, design guidance is still evolving, and many of their benefits – from biodiversity to cooling to amenity – remain difficult to monetise. If nature-based solutions are to become a cornerstone of climate adaptation, the sector will need stronger science and more robust monitoring to demonstrate performance and value.
The centrality of systems
All of this underscores why a systems view of water is essential. Many of the vulnerabilities AWDO identifies can be traced to isolated or fragmented decisions, and many of the unintended consequences we see across the region arise from exactly these well-intentioned, but disconnected, choices: efficient household fixtures and greywater reuse schemes that triggered sewer blockages, or concentrated wastewater; India’s large-scale toilet construction programmes that reduced open defecation but contaminated aquifers when high-volume flushing overwhelmed unlined pits; and Bangladesh’s shift from surface water to tube wells that avoided one disease burden only to expose millions to arsenic and, later, when alternatives faltered, to microbial contamination.
Water interventions sit at the intersection of behaviour, infrastructure, ecology and public health, and each action reverberates through the wider system. Water is, fundamentally, a system of systems. IWA is where those systems can be understood together – where engineers, utility leaders, researchers, innovators and basin planners draw on shared evidence and lived practice to craft solutions that minimise harm, amplify benefits, and remain technically sound, financially realistic, socially acceptable and ecologically grounded.
Taken together, the innovations shared in Bangkok, the examples highlighted in AWDO, and the transitions already under way across Asia, point towards a profound shift in the sector. None of these examples is complete; each still has details that must be refined to ensure longevity and sustainability. Yet, collectively, they reveal the contours of a new normal, one that is more circular, more integrated, more digitally enabled, more climate responsive, and more deliberate about how water is managed, used and reused.
The future will not be built by repeating the systems of the past. It will be shaped by those willing to reimagine boundaries, challenge assumptions and combine creativity with scientific rigour. And across Asia, home to IWA’s largest and most dynamic community, the outlines of that future are beginning to appear. The question now is how quickly we can turn those outlines into systems that endure.
Answering the AWDO call for action
AWDO 2025 offers us a rigorous, region-wide diagnosis of where Asia stands on water security, where gains have been achieved, where systems are stagnating, and where risk is intensifying. The Congress in Bangkok made clear that diagnosis is only a part of the story. The kind of sector Asia now needs is already beginning to emerge around us: a sector that uses water more than once; that recovers value from what was previously considered waste; that blends centralised and distributed systems; that relies on digital intelligence, circular resource flows, and systems thinking to manage growing complexity. AWDO points to the need for this transformation, but it is the lived examples across the region – shared and debated throughout the Congress – that fully reveal what it will take to deliver.
This is precisely where IWA and its members come to the fore. As an association, we do not build treatment plants, lay pipes or enforce tariffs; but as our Congress demonstrated, we can create the conditions for solutions to spread. As was evident from the mix of special forums alongside our core technical and workshop programme, we are ideally placed to do this as we draw key groups – such as end-user utilities, regulators and solution providers – and connect them with the upcoming generation of leaders who can take our agenda forward. So, we connect the people designing new treatment processes with those rethinking regulation; the utilities trialling digital twins with the researchers pushing the boundaries of circular economy science; the innovators piloting nature-based systems with the financiers seeking investable models. We turn individual experiments into shared knowledge, and local success stories into regional learning.
In the years ahead, our contribution will be measured not by the number of reports we publish, but by how effectively we help practitioners navigate this transition. That means curating stronger, regionally grounded case material on reuse, resource recovery, distributed systems and nature-based solutions. It means creating spaces where utilities and innovators can be honest about failures as well as breakthroughs. It means supporting young professionals who sit at the intersection of engineering, data, finance and governance. And it means continuing to share insights so that future iterations of AWDO and similar assessments can fully reflect practitioner realities.
AWDO 2025 reminds us how far we still have to go. But Congress reminded us that progress is already taking shape – in Bengaluru and Beijing, Chennai and Singapore, Manila and Zhengzhou, and in countless utilities, labs and design offices across the region. Our task, as IWA and as a community, is to ensure that these innovations are recognised, connected and amplified. This is a moment when governments, investors and the public are more open than they have been in decades to rethinking how water is managed. As a global association, rooted in practical expertise, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to help shape lives and the future of the water sector. l
For more information on the AWDO 2025 report, see www.adb.org/publications/series/asian-water-development-outlook https://www.adb.org/publications/series/asian-water-development-outlook
The author
Kala Vairavamoorthy is CEO of the International Water Association
