A new 150,000 m3/d desalination plant will soon be constructed at Egypt’s East Port Said.  This plant will become one of the five desalination plants that the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development will develop on the Sinai Peninsula—as part of a three-year, $900 million investment programme.  Egypt’s Ministry of International Cooperation and the Kuwait Fund have entered into a $211 million agreement to construct the plant.^[1] 

This week in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, government officials and members of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs hosted a joint symposium on water management.^[2]  The event’s participants included water experts from 75 different countries, who spoke to questions of “best practice” in “integrated water resource management.”  Tajikistan has adopted the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which includes a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals “to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and tackle climate change by 2030.”^[3] 

Clean water and sanitation forms an important component of the UN initiative to ameliorate water scarcity, which currently affects more than 40 percent of the global population (and which will impact even more people as the earth’s temperatures increase).  To create “universal access to safe and affordable drinking water by 2030,” the UN has identified a course of action that includes international cooperation—to support the development of treatment technologies in impoverished countries, including desalination and water reuse.^[4]

^{Credit: UNICEF India}

As reported in Reuters, the United Arab Emirates utility, Utico Middle East, will invest roughly $185 million “to more than double its water desalination capacity” by 2018.  The company, which is the only privately owned utility in the nation, endeavours to challenge the market dominance of state-owned competitors.^[5]    To increase its capacity of desalinated water, Utico will build a new desalination plant and modify two existing plants.  Presumably, the company will increase its client list, which currently includes manufacturing companies, hotels, palaces, port operators, and private entities.^[6]

Meanwhile, Energy Recovery has recently reported a net income of $500,000 for the second quarter of 2016.  This is a marked contrast from the $3.3 million loss the company reported exactly one year ago, in the same quarter of 2015.^[7]