PRESS RELEASE: PepsiCo Unveils New Water-Modeling Tool at World Water Week
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Wednesday at the Stockholm International Water Institute’s annual World Water Week, PepsiCo announced the company’s latest Water Report and unveiled Hydro-BID, a ground-breaking data management and modeling tool developed in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) that estimates the availability of freshwater in water-scarce regions throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
The IDB’s Hydro-BID is an open-source modeling tool that has the potential to forecast water availability and supply in the LAC region under virtually any climate, population and land use scenario. To date, the tool has projected water supplies in Brazil, Peru, Haiti and Argentina, and is expected to impact more than three million people across the LAC region by 2017.
PepsiCo Foundation’s $5 million grant to IDB’s AquaFund is contributing to fund pilot projects, in partnership with the governments of Switzerland and Austria, in five countries and will reach approximately 500,000 beneficiaries by the end of 2015. While some projects are aimed to improve access to safe water and sanitation services for scattered communities in extreme poverty, other projects like Hydro-BID present an unparalleled effort to develop a suite of watershed modeling tools that could be applied worldwide.
Source: Press release (link opens in a new window)
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