A piece of fruit can travel 10,000 kilometres before it reaches a supermarket shelf. But every journey starts in the same place: with water, soil and biodiversity. In Chile’s Aconcagua Valley, that starting point is under pressure, and the consequences reach far beyond the valley itself. That’s why producers, buyers and governments are now working together to turn the tide.

Their initiative, Aconcagua Network, is the first project under the WAVE Partnership. This collective effort aims to restore balance to water-stressed catchments like the one in the Aconcagua Valley. The partnership was initiated through the Partners for Water programme, building on pioneering work by Nature’s Pride, the Government of the Netherlands, Greenticket and NewForesight. The project is run together with Salling Group, Dole Food Company, Westfalia Fruit and the producer-driven Aconcagua Network, coordinated by NewForesight.

A shrinking resource with global reach

Water availability in the Aconcagua Valley is decreasing, threatening the livelihoods of local producers and communities, as well as the ecosystems they depend on.

The stakes go far beyond Chile. Latin America is the world’s largest food-producing continent, and the Aconcagua Valley is a key sourcing region for fruit that ends up on European shelves. Roughly half of all Chilean avocados entering Europe pass through the Port of Rotterdam. If water runs short at the source, the effects are felt all the way down the value chain – including in the Netherlands.

Collective action across the value chain

Rather than leaving individual producers to manage this challenge alone, local producers and international buyers have joined forces to form the Aconcagua Network: a partnership built on collective action. Exporters and local authorities are not formal members of the Partnership itself, but play an important supporting role, helping strengthen its impact and further growth.

• At watershed level, it brings producers and international buyers together in discussions on water stewardship, regenerative agriculture, monitoring of targets and landscape restoration.
• At value chain level, it drives a market transformation that engages producers and international buyers in understanding the true impact of trade on sourcing landscapes. Together, they work collectively to scale the availability of responsibly produced fruits and vegetables.
• At enabling environment level, it brings local and national authorities to the to build the policy and institutional conditions needed for lasting change.

This layered approach allows actors who could not achieve lasting change on their own to combine forces and enable more sustainable development across the valley.

From data to regenerative practice

On the ground, this collaboration translates into concrete action: regenerative agricultural practices that contribute to climate resilience and data collection for monitoring advances in the management of soil, water and biodiversity.

Shifting to regenerative agriculture is not a quick fix — it takes patience, and results rarely appear within a single growing season. But the producers driving this change are, in the words of one exporter involved in the network, “the most important” link in the chain: without them, there is no supply chain at all.

This progress was reaffirmed during the WAVE Aconcagua Partnership’s annual visit to the Aconcagua Valley in July 2026, where producers, supply chain partners and public institutions agreed on shared priorities for the year ahead, such as accelerating farm-level implementation, and strengthening peer-to-peer learning and monitoring. Read the full report.

A model built to be replicated

What makes the Aconcagua Network particularly relevant is that its approach is not confined to Chile. The model – combining local stewardship, cross-value-chain collaboration, and data-informed decision-making – is designed to be replicated in other water-stressed sourcing regions around the world.

This is precisely the kind of water–biodiversity–food nexus that Partners for Water seeks to strengthen internationally: recognising that biodiversity and healthy ecosystems are not separate from food and water security, but integral to it. By supporting early-stage projects, fostering public–private partnerships, and sharing lessons learned across borders, Partners for Water helps translate local successes like Aconcagua into wider systemic change.

Shared risk, shared responsibility

The message from the Aconcagua Valley is simple and urgent: without water, there is no trade. Securing that water is not the responsibility of one actor alone; it requires producers, buyers, exporters, governments and communities to recognise their shared stake in the same basin and to act accordingly. The Aconcagua Network shows what that looks like in practice and offers a framework for collective action that supports water-secure, resilient food systems far beyond the valley itself.

Wastewater treatment depends on knowing what is happening inside a treatment plant. Yet in many plants, that information is still collected manually. Operators take samples, analyse them in laboratories and only then discover whether the treatment process needs adjustment. By that time, valuable hours may already have been lost, impacting the plant’s operational efficiency and increasing risks.

Brazil is one of the countries investing heavily in expanding its wastewater treatment infrastructure. As treatment coverage grows, so does the need for affordable technologies that help treatment plants operate more efficiently. That is exactly the challenge the Solidus project aims to address.

Over the past two years, Dutch and Brazilian partners have worked together in the Partners for Water project Solidus to test a low-cost sensor for continuous wastewater monitoring. Following a recent project visit to Brazil, Luewton Agostinho, professor at NHL Stenden, believes the results are encouraging.

“The sensor works, it responds to changes in the process and it survived real operating conditions,” he says. “Those are important milestones.”

A growing need for automation

According to Agostinho, the challenge is also a pressing one for Brazil. Only around half of the population currently has access to wastewater treatment infrastructure.

“There is a huge need to improve treatment capacity,” Agostinho explains. “The question is whether we can continue to rely on manual operation as the system grows.”

Historically, many Brazilian utility companies have chosen labour-intensive solutions because sensor technology was expensive and technical staff costs were comparatively low. Today, however, that equation is changing. Treatment plants are becoming larger and more complex, while automation technologies are becoming more affordable. This creates opportunities for new approaches.

Monitoring what matters

At the centre of the Solidus project is a deceptively simple question: how much solid material is present inside a treatment reactor?

Wastewater treatment relies on a carefully balanced biological process in which microorganisms break down contaminants. For the system to function properly, the concentration of suspended particles and sludge must remain within certain limits. “The reactor has to stay in balance,” Agostinho explains. If sludge concentrations become too high or too low, the treatment process becomes less efficient, reducing water quality and increasing the risk that pollutants are discharged into rivers and waterways.

The challenge is that many treatment plants only measure these concentrations intermittently. Operators take a sample, bring it to a laboratory and receive results later. By that time, conditions inside the reactor may already have changed.

“You might discover today that there was a problem yesterday,” Agostinho says. “By then, the poor-quality water may already have been discharged.”

Rather than relying on periodic sampling, sensors can provide real-time information, allowing operators to respond immediately when conditions begin to drift outside acceptable ranges.

A different approach

The project builds on earlier wastewater monitoring initiatives, including Lampion and Inovio, which explored innovative monitoring technologies for wastewater treatment. Unlike many commercial monitoring systems currently on the market, the new sensor uses ultrasound rather than optical measurement techniques.

That distinction is important, Agostinho explains. Commercial optical sensors can be highly accurate, but they are often too expensive for many treatment plants in emerging markets. The ultrasound-based approach is technically simpler and less expensive. Although it is slightly less precise, Agostinho says the accuracy is sufficient for this application.

The central question for the project was therefore straightforward: can a lower-cost sensor still provide reliable information under real operating conditions? To answer that question, the consortium moved beyond laboratory testing and installed the sensor inside an operational wastewater treatment plant in Brazil. The device has now been running continuously for more than seven months.

From laboratory to reality

For Agostinho, one of the project’s greatest achievements is that it successfully crossed the gap between laboratory research and practical implementation.

UASB reactors are harsh places. Equipment must withstand moisture, contamination, temperature fluctuations and constant exposure to industrial conditions. Technologies that work perfectly in the laboratory often struggle once deployed in the field.

The Solidus team deliberately designed a simple prototype and exposed it directly to these challenges. The sensor successfully tracked changes in the concentrations of solids, responding to the same fluctuations detected by a commercially available reference sensor installed alongside it. The sensor registered operational changes, process disturbances and weather-related effects in real time. And most importantly, it remained operational throughout the testing period.

“The sensor works, it responded and it survived,” Agostinho says.

Remaining challenges

Although the pilot produced encouraging results, Agostinho explains that several steps are still needed before the sensor is ready for the market.

The first challenge is product design. The current sensor proved that the technology works, but it was deliberately built as a simple, low-cost prototype. “We now need to move to a nice commercial design,” Agostinho says, describing a product that utility companies will recognise as a professional, market-ready sensor.

The second challenge is communication and data management. According to Agostinho, operators experienced problems with the sensor’s interface and with accessing measurement data. Improving the electronics, communication and automation of the system is therefore one of the main priorities for the next phase.

A third challenge is market deployment. So far, the sensor has been tested in a single wastewater treatment plant. The next step is to install several systems at different sites to verify that the technology performs equally well under a wider range of operating conditions. “If we still get the thumbs up, then I think the sensor is ready,” Agostinho says.

Local ownership

And there is one more challenge: commercialisation, which also raises important strategic questions.

Manufacturing sensors in the Netherlands and exporting them to Brazil would increase costs and potentially undermine one of the technology’s key advantages: affordability. As a result, project partners are exploring models that would allow local production, assembly and distribution. The goal is to identify Brazilian partners who can take ownership of the technology and help bring it to market. “We want local companies to feel that this is their solution as well,” Agostinho says.

The value of international collaboration

Solidus is expected to continue in a follow-up project, with further testing and commercial development through the Dutch Partners for Water programme, which encourages collaboration between Dutch organisations and international partners on water challenges.

For Agostinho, the experience highlights the strengths that different countries can bring to innovation. “We have to learn a lot from Brazil, from how flexible and open they are to collaboration and implementation. And Brazil has a lot to learn from the Netherlands as well,” Agostinho says.

The collaboration has also benefited students and young professionals, several of whom travelled to Brazil during the project to conduct measurements and work directly with local partners.

Looking ahead

As the current project phase draws to a close, the outlook remains positive.

The technology has demonstrated its technical potential, and plans are now taking shape for the next phase. The consortium aims to test the sensor at five wastewater treatment plants under different operating conditions, while refining the commercial design and preparing for wider market deployment.

For Agostinho, the project illustrates how relatively simple innovations can make a significant difference. “We live in a time when water challenges are becoming more complex,” he says. “Climate change, water scarcity and environmental pressures require new solutions.”

Not every innovation needs to be revolutionary. The project shows that innovation can lie in improving existing technologies rather than reinventing them. If Solidus succeeds in doing that, it could help wastewater treatment plants across Brazil operate more efficiently, improve water quality and prepare for the growing demands of the future. But for Agostinho, the project’s most enduring impact extends beyond the technology itself. “The technology can disappear, but the people will stay.”

With the Humans of Partners for Water series, we showcase the people who are involved in and benefit from our projects. The Humans series highlights the stories of the people with whom and for whom Partners for Water works, and on how water affects their lives. Discover how Telma Gómez’s lifelong connection to water has grown into a mission to protect Cartagena’s mangroves and waterways for future generations.

Meet Telma Gómez

In this Humans of Partners for Water series, we introduce Telma Gómez, a social leader from the San Pedro and Libertad neighbourhood in Cartagena, Colombia, and a member of the Cartagena es Manglar Foundation. Through her community work, she brings residents together to protect the city’s water bodies and raise awareness about the impact of pollution on local ecosystems.

A childhood shaped by water

For Telma Gómez, the connection to water began early in life. As a child of around eight years old, she was already swimming and fishing in the waters near her home. An experience that would shape her love for water.

“A lot of people have become aware that we shouldn’t be throwing rubbish into our water. People really appreciate it when things actually get done rather than just talked about.”

Dutch-Colombian water cooperation

Colombia is one of seven delta countries in the Partners for Water 2022–2027 programme. In Cartagena, the programme finances the Water as Leverage Cartagena initiative, which develops inclusive and innovative climate adaptation solutions together with Colombian, Dutch and international partners.

Partners for Water collaborates with Colombian national and local governments, the private sector, NGOs, academia and community organisations to enhance water security and climate change adaptation in the country’s delta cities and agricultural regions.

Local leaders such as Telma play a vital role in this cooperation, connecting community knowledge and lived experience with broader efforts to restore and protect Cartagena’s mangroves, rivers and coastal waters.

Beyond Cartagena, Partners for Water also supports projects across Colombia through its subsidy scheme, enabling Dutch and Colombian organisations to develop and test innovative water solutions, such as initiatives to address freshwater scarcity and soil salinisation in the Magdalena Delta.

More than 400 people gathered at the Fokker Terminal in The Hague for Waterproof 2026. The event is the international meeting place where the Dutch water sector comes together to help shape tomorrow’s water solutions. It also marked the run-up to the UN Water Conference later this year in the United Arab Emirates.

For this special live edition of the Waterproof podcast, produced by Partners for Water, host Tracy Metz recorded in the middle of the event floor. Before introducing her guests, she asked attendees what had brought them there. The answers pointed to one shared concern: are we moving fast enough? “We can move so much faster, and we can only do that through collaboration, through scaling,” said one visitor from the Netherlands Water Partnership. Another, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, put it simply: “We really need each other.”

That sense of urgency ran through conversations with three guests: Neha Mungekar of the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Philip Minderhoud of Wageningen University & Research and Deltares, and Stephen Teeuwen of the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment.

Whose expertise counts?

Neha Mungekar, an architect and urbanist who trained in India before completing her Master’s and PhD in the Netherlands, spoke at Waterproof 2026 about ‘enabling environments’. Her starting point is what she calls the disabling side: water solutions are too often imagined as dikes, dams and pipes – technical fixes designed by engineers, for engineers.

But the people living with a water problem every day are rarely seen as experts. “Ask the homemaker, ask the mother,” Mungekar says. “She will say: when I open the tap, the pressure is not high enough. This is input that we need, but it’s not considered scientific enough.” That lived experience, she argues, is just as important as the technical work of building a pipe or a system. Both to understand the real problem and to check whether a solution is actually working.

Can a delta drown?

That was the title of the talk by Philip Minderhoud, associate professor specialising in land subsidence and relative sea level rise. “Spoiler alert,” he tells Metz, “the answer is yes.”

Subsidence – the gradual sinking of land – is a natural part of how deltas form. But groundwater extraction for agriculture, industry and growing populations is accelerating that process, sometimes by 15 to 20 centimetres a year. Combined with rising sea levels, this produces what Minderhoud calls relative sea level rise: in many deltas, the land is sinking faster than the sea is rising.

The effects can be dramatic and largely invisible. Minderhoud described images from the Philippines where rice fields, once productive, were submerged within a few years – an area more than 20 kilometres from the original coastline, now home to over 300,000 people living inside the tidal zone. “None of the people living in this area were aware that they were sinking,” he says. They blamed sea level rise, flooding or land reclamation, anything but the ground beneath their feet.

“It’s impossible to put a dike around an entire delta system, especially when you have sinking rates that go so fast you don’t have the time to simply adjust to it,” says Minderhoud. The Netherlands had a thousand years to adapt to life below sea level. Many other deltas do not have that time. The good news, he notes, is that subsidence driven by groundwater extraction can be tackled at the source, unlike global climate change, which no single delta can influence on its own. Tokyo and Shanghai successfully slowed their sinking by developing surface water alternatives.

Building trust across borders

Stephen Teeuwen of the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment works in West Africa, supporting governments with sustainable policy development. His organisation does not carry out environmental assessments itself, but helps ensure that the process is done well – including making sure all voices are heard.

In Benin, this meant organising a ‘Tour du Lac’: visits to all eight communities around a lake facing overfishing, pollution and invasive species, to hear directly what local people saw as the most pressing problems and opportunities. The result was a more complete picture: communities needed not only enough fish, but also the infrastructure to store and distribute their catch.

Asked about the most pressing water issue today, Teeuwen points to coordinated groundwater use: “I see a lot of different ministries that have a lot of different plans. These plans are all very important. But if everything is done at the same time without coordination, it’s going to lead to problems.” On a more hopeful note, he highlights a programme in Niger where five sector ministries now sit down together every two to three weeks to coordinate the management of the Niger River. It’s a sign that collaboration, not just technology, is where the real progress will come from.

Cautiously optimistic

Reflecting on the conversations at Waterproof 2026, Metz describes herself as cautiously optimistic. “I am not naive. I know this is an uphill battle,” she says, “but I take strength from the brilliant people I’ve met and spoken with today. They shared their fears and their challenges, but they also shared their ideas and their actual, workable, actionable solutions.” Whether it is rethinking who counts as an expert, tackling subsidence at its source, or building trust between institutions, the message from Waterproof Live is consistent: implementation depends as much on people and collaboration as it does on technology.

What does it take, in your experience, to move a good water idea from the drawing board to lasting implementation?

Did you know that billions of people still wash their clothes by hand? That whole cities are being designed to float? And that a machine in Amsterdam makes water out of thin air? These are the people making it happen.

Water problems can feel abstract – until a dam breaks, a tap runs dry, or women spend three hours of their day doing laundry by hand. The people working on water solutions know this better than anyone. They are engineers, diplomats, hydrologists and development bankers, and what unites them is a refusal to accept the status quo.

This article is based on the ‘Wet Breakthroughs!’ episode of Waterproof, a podcast by Partners for Water.

Building where others wouldn’t dare

Rutger de Graaf has spent two decades designing buildings that float. As co-founder of Blue21, he sees floating cities not as a distant vision but as a practical obligation; a response to rising seas and rapid urbanisation in delta regions where hundreds of millions already live. He is now working on a floating social housing complex made up of 45 apartments in Zwolle, bringing the technology to lower-income groups. The obstacles, he argues, are rarely technical. “The biggest crisis is our lack of imagination.”

But imagination alone does not build cities. The systems around an innovation need to be just as ready as the innovation itself.

The unglamorous work that makes everything else possible

Mary Matthews, Global Water Lead ad interim at UNDP, works in that space. Her focus is governance: getting ministries, regulators and investors aligned. Without it, even the most promising solutions stall. One example she highlights is the Women in Water Diplomacy Network – a programme that trains women mediators to resolve water disputes at community and transboundary level. It builds on the insight that inclusive dialogue produces more durable solutions. “When governance works, the money follows.”

Governance creates the conditions. What happens next depends on the quality of the decisions made within them, and that requires seeing the full picture.

Seeing the whole city at once

Seeing the full picture is exactly what Florian Witsenburg’s company Tygron makes possible. Their digital twins – virtual models of cities and landscapes – let planners and emergency responders test scenarios before they unfold in reality. In Nijmegen, one such model revealed the cumulative impact of 90 simultaneous housing developments, breaking a city-wide building freeze. When the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine was destroyed in 2023, Tigron modelled the resulting flood within half an hour, guiding aid organisations into an active war zone.

Digital twins can map a crisis in real time. However, in some parts of the world, the most urgent problem does not show up on any map. There simply is no water.

Making water from nothing

In places where there is no water, Amsterdam-based Solaq pulls water directly from the air using a wet desiccant process. Co-founder Reuben Moore explains that each unit produces 2,000 litres per day, fits in a shipping container and runs on solar energy or waste heat. The first pilots are running in Mexico, Spain and Brazil, including communities where over 1.5 million people depend on water trucks for water that is not even safe to drink. “We are first focusing on creating a source of water security for places where there simply is no other alternative.”

Having water is one thing. The daily reality it enables – or doesn’t enable – is quite another.

The overlooked burden

For Tanja Huizer, Senior Water Resilience Specialist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), that daily reality is laundry. Huizer has spent years drawing attention to this seemingly simple household task. She shares that between four and five billion people still wash clothes by hand. Women spend roughly 20% of their active time – around three hours daily – on this work alone. The ADB’s Laundry Movement addresses this. It tackles environmental pollution, builds public-private partnerships and focuses on social innovation. The goal is better conditions, with dignity intact. “We have had washing machines for over a hundred years. So let’s allow everybody to benefit from them now.”

The scale of water challenges can feel paralysing. But as these five innovators show, the responses come in every shape and size – from city-wide floating infrastructure to a machine in a shipping container to the simple act of doing laundry with dignity. What they share is the conviction that no one needs to solve everything. Each piece matters. Together, they add up to a waterproof future.