“It wasn’t a viable financial model,” Rehman says. But when Rehman and his colleagues reached out to farmers about their product, they found few were interested. The data was all uploaded to a portal, and farmers then received mobile alerts informing them when to water their crops.Īt AquaAgro’s pilot farms, crop yields increased by 35% and water usage reduced by 50%. Their device, which included a solar-powered box and a thumb-size soil meter, could monitor weather conditions like temperature, humidity, and pressure and measure the soil’s moisture content. The company’s premise was simple: use data to help farmers make better choices about irrigation schedules.
Worried about the future of water in the city, Rehman started working for AquaAgro, a tech startup formed in 2016. Despite that, water is consistently underpriced: usage isn’t metered, and many sources are unregulated. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city, which has a daily water shortfall of hundreds of millions of gallons.
Water conservationists say a mix of resource mismanagement, groundwater depletion, and inadequate water storage have pushed the system to a precarious point. Eventually, snowmelt and glacier melt-two important sources of water for the country-will dwindle to a trickle.īut Pakistan isn’t facing a water problem purely because of climate change. Hotter temperatures are increasing evaporation and creating thirstier crops. Rain falls more heavily there than it once did but not as often, a situation that makes replenishing groundwater reserves difficult. Pakistan is consistently listed as one of the countries most at risk from a water crisis. “I personally feel really bad that I have to do this, but I don’t have a choice.” “This is like a competition where eventually everyone loses,” Rehman says. Ultimately, his family chose to dig an even deeper well, knowing as they did so that if everyone around them did the same thing, the city’s groundwater supply would be further imperiled. When that began drying up, they turned to the city’s system of water delivery trucks to supplement their supply. Initially, they had dug a well, boring into the aquifer that runs beneath the city. At his home in Karachi, his family often went days without getting any water from the city’s pipes. If they drop out of the top 20, the city that overtakes it joins the chart and replaces it.When Ahsan Rehman graduated from one of Pakistan’s top engineering universities in 2016, he knew he wanted a job that would help people. In this research led piece, have been tracking the top 20 cities in the world with the highest population back in 2010 and following their projected population increase or decrease over the years. In fact, only 6 of the top 20 cities with the highest population in 2010 are predicted to still be in the top 20 by 2100. Tokyo is predicted to not even make it into the top 20 cities in the world. Fast forward 90 years you’d expect Tokyo to be even further ahead, right? Wrong. That was nearly 15 million more than Delhi, India, which had the second highest population. In 2010, Tokyo, Japan had the biggest population of any city on the planet with a population of 36 Million people. However, that is set to soar to an astonishing 11.2 billion people in 2100! The United Nations has predicted the world’s population to be 9.8 billion in 2050.
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