00:00It's no secret that water is essential.
00:05In a semi-arid country like Qatar, water costs $2.50 per cubic metre.
00:12Imagine how much it would cost to water all of these.
00:17Luckily, Qatar has found a cheaper and greener solution.
00:22It's found here, deep beneath my feet where few have gone before.
00:26And I've been given special access to uncover how Qatar is creating a sustainable oasis for its green landscape.
00:35I'm Laila Humaira and this is Qatar In Motion.
00:41Water. It's what covers around 70% of the Earth's surface.
00:46Yet how to manage it has been one of mankind's biggest challenges.
00:50So where and how does Qatar get its water supply?
00:54There are a few ways.
00:55The first method is seawater and desalination.
00:59This creates 99% of potable water that's safe for consumption.
01:05Then comes groundwater extraction and treated wastewater.
01:08But it's important to note that these two methods are purely for agricultural and industrial use.
01:15The Gulf state has pumped nearly $30 billion over the last 13 years to reach its National Vision 2030 target of slashing water use in agriculture by 40%.
01:27You may know this place as Katara Cultural Village, home to Qatar's annual Dow Festival, an amphitheater, plenty of restaurants, cafes, art galleries and even hotels.
01:40But dozens of metres below this cultural district is an innovative water treatment facility and I'm getting a special tour of what's called the Katara Project.
01:51Under the green hills and bustling souk of Katara, we enter a whole new world.
01:58A hidden secret that's quietly helping the country turn a page in water sustainability.
02:05Water management is an inevitable challenge.
02:08But that hasn't stopped Qatar from finding long-term solutions, like tapping on the 170-year expertise of French utilities company Veolia.
02:19Veolia has collaborated with Katara Project to build the first water reuse facility of its kind in Qatar, the treated sewage effluent, we call TSE polishing plant.
02:32By reusing water for irrigation and as a make-up water for district cooling.
02:39The facility is also a part of Veolia's new, wider three-year ecological strategy called GreenUp, which aims to depollute, decarbonise and regenerate the world's natural resources.
02:51This ambitious initiative focuses on delivering solutions that address today's most pressing environmental challenges while building resilience for the future.
03:04The GreenUp strategy tackles multiple dimensions of environmental control, where water technologies represent one of the three key boosters.
03:17The Middle East region has also been designated as one of Veolia's three accelerated growth geographies.
03:27So what actually goes behind these pipes? And what's the science and mechanics putting everything in motion?
03:34Nicolas Tournier is the head of operations and performance at Veolia, and he breaks it down for us.
03:40So here we are in a TSE polishing plant. So the TSE water is arriving here behind this wall. So that's where it's stored before being treated.
03:50And the water goes inside those pipes. So you may not see it, but it goes first through these self-cleaning filters and then it will go along the treatments.
04:00And then it moves on in these GRP pipes and it goes to the UF filtration membranes that we have here.
04:10So inside these vessels are filtration membranes that continue polishing the water.
04:18But there's also another peculiar question. Why was this plant built underneath Katara Cultural Village?
04:26The plant is located underground to minimize visual impact and reduce noise pollution in this very important cultural and touristic destination.
04:36The Katara project requirement was that it had to fit inside this basement to help conserve valuable land space.
04:43So we designed a tailored solution that could fit inside the space constraint and power supply requirements.
04:52By using this facility, up to 15,000 cubic meters of water is saved per day. That's 15 million liters.
05:01To give you an idea, that's approximately six Olympic sized swimming pools, which is a lot of water.
05:08And instead of using massive amounts of fresh water to sprinkle over gardens and cool districts,
05:13the technology being deployed here means that raw sewage can be turned into reusable but high quality water.
05:20At the moment, the water is being used for the intended purpose of a plant, which is feeding of the cooling towers and irrigation.
05:29So people can enjoy a nice air-conditioned environment in Katara's cafes and retail spaces,
05:37while also enjoying the lush vegetation of Katara's green hills.
05:42So while the general public may not see the plant itself like you are seeing today, they may enjoy its many benefits while visiting Katara.
05:51Like clockwork, these sprinklers at Katara hills switch on precisely at a certain time, several times a day, to keep the grass green.
06:01Just by looking at the lush lawn, it's hard to tell that the temperature in Katara can hit nearly 50 degrees Celsius in the summer.
06:08Other than beautifying the landscape, there's also a cost advantage to using this treated water.
06:14By reusing water, this plant allows Katara project to reduce water costs dramatically, say from 9 Katari Rial down to 1 Katari Rial per cubic meter,
06:26and reduces the power needed for water production to just 20% of that required for other treatment solutions.
06:35And it's not just the sprinklers. The water in the fountains, cooling towers and small canals like these that run all around Katara Cultural Village
06:44are the products of the treated sewage affluent that's been processed beneath the district.
06:50As heritage, creativity, history and art continue to flood the spaces around Katara Cultural Village,
06:57so will the flow of technology and innovation that's helping to keep it all afloat
07:02and steering Katara towards a greener future.
07:09Elsewhere in Katara, other institutions and individuals are helping to shape the next generation of water scientists.
07:16This is the Education City Ceremonial Court, a multi-purpose open-air space with intricate designs that exude grandeur and elegance.
07:25But there's also deep meaning in these waters and wisdom in the study of its cycle.
07:31I'm Raha Hakim Navar. I'm a hydrologist and also a research professor and senior advisor at Georgetown University.
07:39The focus of my work is around issues of water scarcity and water security,
07:45but also around disasters and how we manage water-related disasters.
07:50I work a lot with satellite remote sensing, so data from space.
07:55There's such a wealth of Earth observations or data coming from anything that's not ground-based.
08:03The work for me is personally the most rewarding thing I could imagine doing.
08:08I'm from a city called Esfahan in central Iran.
08:12We also would experience periods of droughts, and I think that also made me very fascinated with the times that we had rain.
08:20I loved it. I loved going outside when it was raining, and I loved collecting the water because it wouldn't rain all the time.
08:25Probably that early interest is what got me to get into hydrology.
08:31I wanted to be a part of things that could have real impact.
08:34What I'm really curious about is how we can integrate all this different research to connect it with decision-making,
08:42to connect it with policies, to connect it with economic decisions.
08:47We're testing new ways of immersive-based teaching of environmental science to students that are not necessarily studying for an environmental science degree.
08:56Students got to learn about their immediate environment, which is Education City,
09:01looking at the facilities management of the buildings, how water and energy is managed,
09:06what are some of the challenges and what are some of the exciting innovative things that are being implemented right here, where we live.
09:11Last year, we had students from Georgetown University in Qatar that were competitively selected to join a course about climate change adaptation in Greece.
09:21I think really having the students spend time in this place-based way to understand these challenges,
09:29to engage with the community, to engage with the people, the NGOs, the civil organizations that are doing a lot of the work on the ground.
09:38A lot of the challenges around water are extremely interdisciplinary.
09:42There are students that are learning economics, politics, culture and arts and the humanities.
09:48They can serve as those translators between the science, between the technical, between what may be research,
09:54and where decision-making needs to take place.
09:59My quest to learn more about how Qatar will continue to develop its water technology has led me to the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute at Hamad bin Khalifa University.
10:11As its name suggests, KIRI is a leading research, development and innovation institute.
10:17One of its main focus areas is water security.
10:20And I'm going to meet Dr. Khaled Mahmoud, who heads the water center at KIRI.
10:26Speaking in water security in general, we know that Qatar relies majorly on desalination for drinking water and consumption of water for the public.
10:37There are actually this big project for storing drinking water in the mega reservoirs.
10:43And currently, we have over five days water security reserve.
10:48And the target actually to go to seven days storage.
10:52Now, as I mentioned, they are enforcing the utilization of treated wastewater in this application,
10:58so that we can relieve the pressure on both, either the desalinated water that's stored or ground water,
11:06which is an issue that Qatar is trying to kind of fix, where the salinity of the ground water is rising up because of the abstraction,
11:16less rain recently due to climate change and so on.
11:19So I see that there is a big future for reusing the treated wastewater to actually enforce the water security in Qatar.
11:30So while Veolia's water treatment facility is a hidden secret of Qatara Cultural Village,
11:35it's no mystery that it's helping Qatar move towards a more water secure and sustainable future.
11:41Sometimes it's worth looking beneath the surface in order to move ahead.
11:46And I certainly gained a new appreciation for this iconic district.
11:51That's all the time we have for now.
11:53Thanks for watching Qatar in Motion and see you next time.
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