WEF Hosts Meeting to Drive Innovation in the Nutrient Sensors Market

This week in Washington, WEF hosted a planning meeting with EPA, USGS, and ACWA to discuss the next steps to bring market efficiencies for nutrient sensor technology to explore opportunities in providing services and purchasing of water sensors. Nutrient pollution is one of America’s most significant and costly environmental problems, and requires focused monitoring to fully assess interventions, evaluate progress, and target investments. New technologies are emerging that allow for sustained measurement at relevant scales; however, organizations and agencies have a limited capacity to purchase this technology. The market is currently fragmented between environmental, industrial, municipal, academic, governmental, and costal monitoring groups. The group is looking to bring community leaders together from the users, influencers, and suppliers side to discuss beneficial market efficiency strategies that will enable the proliferation of sensor uses. With the release of the Nutrient Roadmap, WEF is looking to help this effort and drive innovation to help understand the environment in the nutrient and monitoring sector. WERF, WEF’s research partnering organization, has created a compendium on water quality sensors and monitors. The compendium is a resource developed for anyone working with or considering the use of online instrumentation from water quality monitoring. Another WEF and WERF Initiative helping to further nutrient monitoring technology is the Leaders Innovation Forum for Technology (LIFT) which has a Creating the Space effort that seeks to identify major influences to innovation such as nutrient sensors in the water sector and identify measures to manage or share the risk. The next market efficiencies for nutrient sensors meeting will be held in San Jose, CA at the WEF Nutrient Symposium July 26 – 28. For more information on the market efficiencies meetings please contact Marisa Tricas at mtricas@wef.org.