FLUIDANALYTICS.AI
Daniel Williams
Oct 23, 2025
GENEVA, CH—The accelerating impacts of climate change, urbanization, and aging infrastructure are forcing cities to rethink how water systems are monitored, managed, and governed. This challenge is the focus of Water-BOOST: Enabling Innovation for Future-Ready Cities, a recent report published by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Imperial College London.
The accelerating impacts of climate change, urbanization, and aging infrastructure are forcing cities to rethink how water systems are monitored, managed, and governed. This challenge is the focus of Water-BOOST: Enabling Innovation for Future-Ready Cities, a recent report published by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Imperial College London.
The report examines why many promising water technologies fail to scale and identifies a consistent pattern across global cities: innovation efforts remain fragmented, siloed, and disconnected from the institutional systems responsible for long-term operation and resilience. Water-BOOST argues that future progress depends not on isolated tools, but on integrated, systems-level approaches that connect infrastructure, data, governance, and decision-making.
From Innovation Pilots to System Readiness
Through case studies spanning cities such as San Francisco, Singapore, Barcelona, Accra, and Bengaluru, Water-BOOST introduces the concept of a minimal viable system—a configuration in which utilities, regulators, innovators, investors, and research institutions are structurally aligned. Without this alignment, innovation remains confined to pilots and demonstrations, unable to influence city-wide outcomes.
The report places particular emphasis on the need to unify traditionally separate domains: infrastructure condition, real-time monitoring, environmental risk, and public-health intelligence. Water contamination, flooding, and sewer overflows are shown to be systemic phenomena that propagate across networks and catchments, rather than isolated asset failures.
Fluid Analytics Within the Water-BOOST Framework
Within this context, Fluid Analytics is referenced in the Water-BOOST report as an innovator contributing to urban water innovation ecosystems, including San Francisco. The company is also recognized through the World Economic Forum’s UpLink Aquapreneur Innovation Initiative and listed among contributing organizations to the research.
Fluid Analytics’ work over the past several years has focused on developing infrastructure intelligence across wastewater, stormwater, and surface-water systems. Its deployments across the United States and India have addressed challenges ranging from sewer condition assessment and flood risk to contamination detection and wastewater-based public-health surveillance.
These field experiences reflect a core conclusion of the Water-BOOST report: water resilience cannot be achieved through disconnected technologies. Instead, cities require continuous, catchment-scale intelligence that links physical infrastructure with real-time data and predictive analytics.
AquaGrid: Translating Systems Thinking into Practice
AquaGrid, developed by Fluid Analytics, represents an effort to operationalize the systems approach articulated in the Water-BOOST framework. Rather than addressing infrastructure, monitoring, or water quality as separate problems, AquaGrid integrates multiple layers of urban water intelligence into a unified platform.
The system combines AI-based infrastructure condition assessment, real-time sensing across sewer and surface-water networks, and catchment-scale analytics that incorporate rainfall, tides, and environmental signals. This integrated design enables earlier detection of flooding, contamination, and overflow risks, while supporting coordinated response across utilities and agencies.
By aligning inspection data, live monitoring, and predictive modeling within a single operational framework, AquaGrid reflects Water-BOOST’s emphasis on moving from innovation pilots toward institutionally usable systems—tools that cities can adopt, operate, and scale.
Aligning with the Future-Ready Cities Agenda
As discussions at #BlueDavos and the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting continue to highlight water resilience as a defining challenge for future-ready cities, Water-BOOST provides a strategic lens for understanding what enables innovation to succeed at scale.
The report’s findings underscore a broader shift underway in the water sector: from asset-centric monitoring to system-level intelligence; from fragmented tools to integrated platforms; and from reactive management to anticipatory resilience.
Fluid Analytics’ inclusion in the Water-BOOST report and the launch of AquaGrid reflect this shift—linking years of applied work in infrastructure intelligence, water contamination, and public health with the systems-based approach now being advocated at the global policy level.
Together, Water-BOOST and AquaGrid illustrate how cities can move beyond isolated solutions toward connected, data-driven systems capable of supporting long-term water resilience under growing climate and urban pressures.