As the availability of natural fresh water sources rapidly declines globally, a result of world population growth, lifestyle changes and climate change, countries around the world have turned to non-traditional water sources such as wastewater reclamation and desalination.

Hassan Arafat

Dr. Hassan A. Arafat is the former director of the Center for Membranes & Advanced Water Technology at Khalifa University. He is now senior director for the Research & Innovation Center for Graphene and 2D Materials.

In fact, over the past 20 years, the total global desalination capacity has increased by more than 1,500 percent.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries particularly have grown to rely on desalination, which now provides more than 90 percent of total potable water supply in those Gulf countries.

This tremendous growth was catalyzed by a plethora of innovations that helped improve energy efficiency and cut the cost of desalination. These include new membranes, energy-recovery devices and effective membrane-based pre-treatment technologies.

However, the sustainable provision of potable water through desalination and the treatment of industrial and domestic wastewater effluents is still a significant challenge, both for the UAE and globally.

The UAE’s leadership has emphasized that securing a sustainable fresh water supply for the country is a top priority. This is indeed a grand challenge that must be met with grand, innovative solutions. To create such holistic solutions, multidisciplinary efforts are a must.

This is why Khalifa University (KU) created the Center for Membranes & Advanced Water Technology (CMAT). The Center’s main goal is to create a framework for well-coordinated research efforts that have a clear, common goal: generating a sustainable potable-water supply for the UAE and the globe.

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At the forefront of the Center’s research goals are developing innovative technologies for desalination, wastewater reclamation and relevant membrane processes.

This framework takes full advantage of KU’s tremendous accumulated research capacity to develop innovative technologies for desalination, wastewater reclamation and relevant membrane research.

The result: The Center is a viable ecosystem for relevant technology development and intellectual-property transfer, driving interdisciplinary novel-membrane and water-technologies research to secure sustainable sources of water for the UAE and the world now and into the future.

Update: A previous version of this story incorrectly listed the director of the Center for Membranes & Advanced Water Technology at Khalifa University. Dr. Shadi Hasan is the current CMAT director.