The Need for Desalination in Humanitarian Crises

Abstract

Humanitarian crises ranging from political unrest to natural disasters are becoming increasingly prevalent with global climate change. Correspondingly, there are an increasing number of regions that consist both of high crises risk and saline water contamination. Such regions include the Middle East, Subsaharan Africa (particularly along the Great Rift Valley), Southeast Asia (including the Mekong Delta and Pacific Islands), and coastal regions. However, there is a lack of robust, deployable desalination technologies for humanitarian crises. This is mainly attributed to the highly-constrained environment which necessitate: minimization of consumables, rapid speed of deployment and simplification of operation and maintenance. Such constraints are often secondary thoughts, are difficult to traditionally quantify, and differ from stable commercial situations where operations are supported by an accessible supply chain and network of technicians. These barriers have particularly hindered the adoption of membrane technology and thus, high volume desalination and chemical contaminant removal. This work justifies the need for desalination technology in humanitarian crises via geospatial analysis of saline water databases and exploration of regional case studies, formulates design requirements for an emergency-use desalination system based on needs extracted from open-interviews of stakeholders and literature review, evaluates some of the gaps within currently employed deployable desalination systems and explores the potential opportunities of other desalination technology.