1.3 Billion People Don’t Have Access To Clean Water, By 2050, 5.3 Billion Won’t Have Access: Alain Gachet, Chairman & CEO, Radar Technologies International

On 9th March, at the CleanEquity Monaco 2018 Conference, Alain Gachet, Chairman & CEO, Radar Technologies International presented his work with respect to water scarcity and aquifer mapping. The conference was attended by a range of companies, academicians and other delegates in the sustainability sector. His attendance was made possible by the sponsorship of Spike Hughes's Cohesion Investments from London. 

“I am going to speak about 3 major countries which are famous for its droughts, which is Darfur, Kenya, and Iraq. 1.1 billion people do not have access to clean water, and by 2050, 5.3 billion won’t have access to it," said Gachet, adding that, “Climate Change and the growing population is the reason why there is a shrinking access to clean water. All the surface water is a small bubble, and 99.04% of water is underground, which are deep water reserves. These reserves have never been mapped. I am now a deep water explorer, not a hydrogeologist. My experiment started in Libya, a game changer program. I discovered that Khadaffi has built a huge aqueduct. I discovered it was leaking, and the giant leak covering 2700 km^2. Billions of cubic meters of water was lost every year.”

Gachet elaborated on his dream, saying, “My dream was to create a geoscanner, which was designed to detect deep aquifers, operated by satellites. After 2 years of intensive brainstorming and failures, the WATEX was invented in 2004, just before the Darfur crisis. It can detect and project a commercially available image where soil moisture is hidden by surface obstacles. I discovered the water underground. WATEX layer removes surface ground to detect the water ground. There was a water war in Darfur, and people were starting to incinerate dead cattle near wells. There are about 250,000 Sudanese refugees in Chad. There was a confrontation with Libyan and Sudanese rebels under the protection of the UN Peace Keeping forces. WATEX map used to avoid rebel forces to control water potential areas. And the water finally came.”

“The input for WATEX was remote sensing data, geological data, climatic data, geomorphological data and geophysical data, and the output was a drilling master plan which included shallow aquifer mapping, deep aquifer mapping, recharge areas mapping and soil classification," said Gachet.

Gachet went on to say, “July 2011 was hell in North Kenya, and a lot of cattle died, which meant that children died. Drought obliges them to abandon their land and migrate. Or it obliges them to form survival militias. We were tracking deep aquifers through our platform and 6 months later, deep unexpected aquifers were identified. In July 2013 we discovered giant aquifers with a 70-year underground reserve, 400 feet down. Women had to walk almost 40 km a day with cattle to get water. In July 2014, Kenya changed from hell to oases." He spoke about his work in Iraq as well, saying, “2011 to 2017 there was a launch of Iraq Post-war reconstruction and they wanted me to find a solution to the drought issue. WATEX 3rd generation found the underground water in Iraq as well. Iraq reconstruction was based on the discovery of more than 60 new aquifers in 9 months. So we have worked in countries like Chad, Sudan, Angola, Gabon, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Iraq. In April 2016, WATEX and RTI Exploration were awarded by the Space Technology Hall of Fame from NASA.”

“So my dream became a game-changer, with its integrated groundwater management system, designed to make decisions at a national scale. New Technologies like WATEX can bring peace through prosperity. Our next phase will be South Africa, where there is a huge water scarcity problem," said Gachet.