Hello everyone! We are Team Earth, Wind, & Water and we'll be focusing on the issue of water scarcity and inaccessbility to low-income communities. Our team believes that water scarcity is a prevailing environmental and social issue with detrimental impacts. Water scarcity is not just an effect of industrialization or increasing pressure of environmental demands, but a detriment to human rights and the inability of our communities to access safe drinking water or rely on clean water systems. We feel that water scarcity should be a priority for not only national development but global initiative as those around us are struggling without access to sustain necessities like drinking, cooking, bathing, or growing food. Our team is focused on highlighting solutions that can mitigate the issue of water inaccessibility in low-income communities, in hopes that families can enjoy good health and companies can provide ethical practices to ensure safety and clean sanitation.

Earth, Wind, and Water is addressing the issue of excess water consumption by providing ways to regulate and reduce water consumption for populations which have an more abundance and greater access while also offering resources to populations living in areas that have little to no access to clean running water. Our team focused on the underlying environmental and social issues which greatly impact all communities no matter their economic income.

Excess water usage and water contamination has severely finished the amount of water that is available to support life on earth. Even though 71% of the earth is covered in water, 96.5% of that is in the oceans. Only about 3% of earth’s water is fresh with only 0.5% actually available because the rest is locked up in glaciers, polar ice caps, atmosphere, and soil. Our company, Earth, Wind, and Water chose to tackle this issue because it is imperative that our consumption habits change and we are offering solutions to do so. 

Our team devised an app in order to meet the design criteria of offering a solution that enables many communities to participate in water conservation efforts and learn more about the water crisis. Our main concern is answering how might we increase conservation efforts but also promoting water accessibility to low-income communities? By offering a solution that is financially and physically viable, we increase the amount of people that’s able to participate in decreasing overall water usage and becoming more aware of their influence not only on local level, but also on the global scale. Our app, available on both the Apple store and Android store, is available to download for anyone in the world. The application’s main feature is to record one’s personal water usage by tracking the time used for activities like brushing one’s teeth or taking a shower. We also offer informational resources that have locations for the nearest source of clean running water, and expert knowledge on the importance of water conservation and daily habits that can promote conscious consumption of water.

Earth, Wind, and Water holds a competitive edge by partnering with organizations like Patagonia to provide not only information but also incentives like prizes to our loyal users who have made significant reductions in their water consumption levels. These partnerships give us unique access to markets that are interested in sustainability beyond water conservation. Partnering with organizations whose mission is driven by sustainable living on this planet will give us access to groups who may be living a zero-waste life, or may have chosen to go vegan for the planet. This access exposes our product to a much wider market than companies that focus solely on water conservation. 

Throughout our business model, we’ve determined that in order to effectively to produce effective solutions, we need to cater to the increased education about the impacts of water scarcity while also increasing the levels of conservation of personal use. With careful planning, our mission is able to enhance the knowledge that’s desperately needed to mitigate water scarcity within all populations and to ultimately protect our environment.

We are at a crucial point in time where our actions now will determine if future generations will have life on this planet. Everyday our biodiversity is decreasing, the earth’s carrying capacity is being pushed to its limits, and people are suffering from famine, drought, forest fires, and many other things that all point to the exploitation of earth’s resources. If we do not act now, if we do not change our habits of consuming water today, we will have no fresh water left on this planet by the year 2040.

As a team, we did not have a strong background regarding the effects of water scarcity nor did we know how to accurately assess the various difficulties of creating an all-inclusive app once we began researching possible solutions. However, from thorough research and analysis, the process of our deliverable created a challenging initiative, yet we were able to develop and learn how to address difficult problems. From our drafts, our team was able to reflect and redirect our vision on how to properly assess our situation fully and ultimately develop a prototype design that effectively answers our design criteria.

Overall, the lessons we have learned as a team has also greatly impacted our own understanding of being able to solve difficult problems and provide solutions that are able to incorporate and encompass every step of the design process. From this experience, the main struggles were addressing and being able to confront that every solution will have its own set of limitations. Ultimately, the Earth, Wind, & Water team is very pleased about our final result and ability to come together and create a solution that will not only positively impact the environment, but provide many communities the opportunity to get involved, become informed, and create a better world.