I'd build a Rainwater Harvesting Planner that would help homeowners and businesses to design and optimize rainwater collection systems depending on their location, local rainfall data and the size of their roof. To give you an example of how simple this math really is, if there is a 1000 square foot roof that receives an average of 30 inches of rain a year, you will receive approximately 18,700 gallons of water in a year off that rooftop. Most people have no idea there is that number right above them. An app that enables you to enter your postcode, rooftop dimensions and average yearly rainfall to provide you with a system design, storage tank size and payback timeline for your system would help to put this information into perspective. Right now it's very difficult to figure out if harvesting makes sense or not because of perceived difficulties and expensive upfront costs associated with harvesting systems. But a planner that runs the numbers and shows you a 3.75 year ROI on mid-range installations, would completely change that discussion. Edge cases matter too. The app should take into account seasonal variation in rainfall, local rules on collection limits and greywater reuse as these vary wildly depending on where you are.
In Phoenix, we are familiar with drought. As owner of Behind The Scenes Productions, I am an expert at building massive, efficient structures under tight deadlines. I am familiar with large event arenas and corporate events and the large amounts of people who attend them. If I were to build an app to address drought, it would be a way to use real-time data from events and sensors to take that gray water from these events and find a way to distribute it to local farming, landscaping, or construction needs. Instead of wasting the gray water, the app could find a need to use it for cooling systems, or put it back into farms for agriculture. Maybe a marketplace could be built where you have a collector of gray water and they deliver it to their customers. Just a thought.
If I could make an app to solve drought, it would be an in-home real-time water tracking app that would connect directly to your plumbing. Not a general tips app. Not government awareness campaign in app form. Something that actually shows you, in real time, how much water your home is consuming and where it's going. Most households have no idea as to how much they waste water on a daily basis. Working throughout residential plumbing in Adelaide for 10 years now, the number of slow leaks, dripping taps and running toilets I've discovered and homeowners were completely unaware of is truly staggering. (And these are not dramatic failures. They're silent, continuous losses that accumulate over months.) Speaking of that, I would like to explain how the app would actually work. Smart meters and sensors that could be installed on your pipes would pump usage data in real-time into the app. The minute your water consumption is more than your normal usage on a daily basis, you are notified about it. That alert lets you know which part of the house is consuming water and by how much. Catching a slow leak in that point, before it runs for 6 months unnoticed, is where the real water saving occurs at scale.
As a legal practitioner, I've seen how a lack of resources can lead to conflict when people are not aware of all the information surrounding the issue. So I think an app for combating drought should be designed with the purpose of helping people understand more about water usage and rights. In many cases, people are not able to wrap their head around the systems or regulations in place for controlling and distributing resources like water. This app could help them understand more about their local water levels, restrictions, and usage, as well as how they can use it for their farms and businesses. This could become something farmers could rely on, for instance, to gauge how much water is available in their region and what restrictions are in place when they are planning their irrigation systems. I think it would be a great way for people to truly understand how resources are distributed so that they are able to combat drought eventually. I think it would be a great way for people to truly understand how resources are distributed so that they are able to combat drought eventually.
I'd build an app to put real-time soil moisture data right in the hand of a farmer and match with hyperlocal weather forecasting to create their daily irrigation schedule. That's the gap that no one wants to talk about. Most of the drought response tools are designed to support policy analysts, not the person who is standing in a field at 6 a.m. trying to decide whether or not to run the line. In my work designing large-scale outdoor installations for events and hospitality venues, water management came up constantly because venues were running sprinkler systems on a fixed timer regardless of rain, humidity or ground saturation. We saw waste that was completely avoidable, just because nobody had the right data at the right moment. The app I'd build uses data from soil sensors and regional weather information feeds to determine if irrigation actually is needed at all that day and by how much. Field tests on sensor based irrigation systems demonstrate water usage is reduced by 30.47% to 47.12% compared to timer based water scheduling only. That's not a marginal gain. For hospitality properties dealing with green space management across multiple outdoor spaces, which is a real operational headache that people I've watched as clients have battled with, that's a reduction in costs of utilities and less human supply disruption during drought periods. What actually is a solution to drought is not more data sitting somewhere in the dashboard. It's actionable data that is released directly to the person that is making the call as they are calling-typically in real time.
Farmers are still using an enormous amount of guesswork when they irrigate their crops. The majority of irrigation systems operate by either a timer or by "gut feel," as opposed to the actual need for water in the soil for that specific day. The app I would develop collects real-time soil moisture readings from inexpensive ground-based sensors installed throughout the farm. In addition, the app will combine these soil moisture readings with weather forecast information and then provide each farmer with the exact amount of water to be applied to a particular area of their land, and at what time to do so. Ultimately, the issue of water timing is the major problem, and not just water scarcity. There has been research conducted in Australia that suggests that up to 50 percent of agricultural irrigation water can be wasted due to overwatering. Improving this single inefficiency will greatly improve the overall efficiency of irrigation.
If you have ever seen a garden dry out even though you water it often, the problem is usually not the amount of effort. It is timing. Most people tend to water on a schedule, not according to what the soil really needs, and it is this difference that causes drought damage to occur. (I have watched this happen on numerous installations around DFW in which clients had irrigation systems running on timers and their plants were still stressed.) The app I would create uses sensors that are put directly in the ground to measure soil moisture. Those sensors relay real-time readings to your phone, providing you with the actual moisture level at the root level, and not just at the surface. The app then adds local weather forecasts and automatically changes your watering suggestions based on not only the soil, but the weather. Speaking of that, let me describe some of the reasons why this is preferable to a normal irrigation timer. Timers are based on the calendar on when they will water. Sensors make the decision when to water on the basis of the reality. In a drought, these two things are so different, and that is where the crops and gardens fail. After over a decade of assisting DFW homeowners with water savings using artificial turf, the customers that still maintain natural beds of gardens have the most difficult time with this exact problem. An application that can take the guesswork out of this and replace it with actual data would really make a difference in the way people treat their outdoor spaces when the weather is dry.
If I were building a drought app, I would put IoT sensors in the ground and connect them to a dashboard. At Design Cloud, we used real-time reporting to catch leaks fast. Cloud platforms handle growth better than anything else, so the app stays stable as you add users. You have to make sure it integrates easily with local systems. Honestly, getting new tech to work with old infrastructure is usually the biggest headache. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to my personal email
I would create an application that would not monitor the rain or irrigation. When teaching Pranayama, I observed students alter major habits simply because of paying attention to their breath, and this is how I would go about it. Pranayama does not work by quitting. It establishes a rhythm and the rhythm shows you something your body was doing without you knowing and water use works the same way. The average individual is spending somewhere around 30 gallons a day, without conscious thought to it and I have discovered that there is no way to correct that unconscious behavior through display of data alone. The app would provide breath-paced check-ins at the time when individuals use the most water resources in the morning routines, cooking and lengthy showers. Ayurveda does not consider water a resource to deal with. It views water as an alive relationship to which you grow just like a practitioner grows a relationship with breath or digestion. In Siddhi Yoga, we have helped students in 125 countries to change their habits not through prohibition but through organized body-consciousness practices, and the changes are long-lasting since they have begun in the body rather than a push notification. A better interface has never been the best weapon of permanent behavior change, it has always been a greater internal point of reference.
The app I'd build has one idea in it: make waste of water visible in the moment, and then make saving it worth doing. Right now, most households do not have any honest picture of how much water they really use. You get a monthly bill, perhaps a number that means nothing without context and that's it. (I've been in retail all my life for more than 20 years, and I can tell you when people don't see the data in real-time, behavior doesn't change. Full stop.) We learned this here at Flatiron when we began to show our subscribers the trends in purchases, week by week, rather than just year by year. The engagement immediately went up. The app would have the same functionality. It would retrieve real-time usage data directly from a smart meter attached to your home, and then display this directly in your phone in simple language. Not gallons per month. Gallons per hour, by the source, irrigation, laundry, showers, kitchen. If you have ever had any experience with a utility bill and felt like you were dealing with a mystery, you know exactly why that kind of detail makes a difference.
If I could make one app to solve drought, it would be a local water marketplace which connects excess water to the places that need it here and now. People with excess water due to rain tanks overflowing, well overflow or recycled greywater might put it up for sale to nearby buyers or those people who needed water. The app matches supply and demand based on location and requirement, meaning each drop of water can go where it is needed most. It works like ride - sharing except for water instead of cars. Drought is not always simply a lack of water. It is often a problem of moving and timing. Water lies idly in one place while farmland ten miles away is running out of water, and nobody has built the transaction layer to move it fast enough. At CartMango, we send payment between sellers and buyers in seconds by utilizing location and behavior information. If we can use the same matching engine for water, it could contribute toward whole communities surviving in the dry times.
The drought response application is a web-based platform designed to compile significant water related datasets in one location. This would incorporate weather data, soil moisture levels, reservoir levels, satellite imagery, and usage data; all of which would be processed to issue simple alerts and recommendations to farmers, cities, businesses, and homes. The value of this application is that drought conditions are often addressed after they already occur (too late). By utilizing this type of application, users will be able to take actions sooner; by eliminating waste, warning of impending shortages, and making better decisions on a day to day basis. In doing so, the end goal will be to reduce the amount of water wasted, have a better way to plan for the future, and build more resiliency against droughts as a community.
The best, most practical drought app will be an "early warning" app for water stress at the neighborhood scale. It will include all the weather data, soil moisture readings, reservoir water levels, and local residential/commercial/industrial water consumption to provide residents with a visual of where they are in terms of water stress as it moves toward a restriction situation prior to those restrictions occurring. For example, a homeowner receives an alert that local groundwater levels are dropping more quickly than anticipated and receives specific action items such as "reduce your irrigation," "check your home for leaks," and/or "change your water usage to lower demand hours." Farmers may also utilize this type of information to schedule their irrigation based on actual need rather than a set schedule. The true value of using an app to monitor drought conditions is to transform the warnings received from a governmental agency into a "daily decision-making" tool for individuals and groups, which allows them to make decisions and take collective action to reduce the demand placed upon the available water supply.
I would build an app that will tell a farmer exactly how much water a particular plot requires on a given day. It uses actual conditions instead of the regional averages or last season's data. The app draws data from soil moisture sensors, local weather feeds and satellite photos. It generates field level irrigation schedules on an hourly basis (every 24 hours). The difference between a regional forecast and plot level data is greater than most people imagine. Studies from precision agriculture trials indicate that farms that use localized irrigation data reduce water use by 30-47 per cent compared to farms that rely on generalized zone recommendations. The reason for the gap is that most of the tools for drought treat a county as a single crop in a single soil type, which it never is. Outside of that, after working with systems for long enough that are data-heavy, you see where problems actually occur. It's rarely the technology. It's about getting the right information to the right person in no time at all. So the app would not be living in a dashboard that nobody uses. It would send a plain language alert directly to a farmer's phone every morning, something like "Field 3 is at 61% field capacity, hold irrigation today" or "Field 7 will drop below threshold by Thursday, do a 4 hour cycle Wednesday night." No interpretation is needed. The aim is to close the gap between data and action, since it closes quickly in a drought.
If I had the opportunity to create a new app to combat drought, I wouldn't begin with the actual water but rather improve the decision-making process surrounding usage of water. Drought, as we know it, is often a coordination and data problem. Farmers, citizens, and communities often find themselves making decisions regarding water usage without having access to the complete information available on the location, time and amount of water used; however, a staggering 4 billion people experience some sort of severe water scarcity at least once each year. The new application that I would create would be called HydraNet (i.e. Real-Time Water Intelligence Network). HydraNet would consist of satellite data, weather monitoring syndromes, soil monitoring sensors and AI to define the exact location and amount of where water exists, where it has been wasted, and where it will be needed in the shortest possible time frame (e.g. could define exactly how much water is currently being used at a particular field/area of land). The new app would allow farmers to only irrigate when their crops truly need it, cities would be able to better identify leaking pipes, and communities could collaborate on available water sources before water shortages become full-fledged humanitarian crises. Agriculture utilizes approximately 70% of the world's fresh water resource but we have numerous existing models of irrigation that utilize "low-tech" and "smart" irrigation systems that have proven they can reduce water usage upwards of 30% without negatively impacting agricultural yields. This indicates to us the importance of ensuring that water is used as smartly as possible. Solutions to combat draught will not always require more water; rather we need to coordinate our existing water supply much better. But, although no man made technology can induce or create rain, we have the capability of using technology to provide us the intelligence necessary to use every available drop more intelligently.
If I could build one app it would be a real time supply tracker for conflict zones and places hit by energy shortages. Not because supplies are not present in such situations. The problem is nobody is sure where they are or how to get them to the right place fast enough. The app would map food, water, fuel and medical supplies in real time and show aid workers, governments and civilians exactly where things are and where they need to go. Think of it like a delivery tracking app but instead of packages it is moving the things that people actually need to survive. Gas shortages have the same effect. Fuel exists but the information of where it is and how to access it is spread through agencies that never share information. One platform that pulls all of that together and puts it on a phone changes the outcome to the people caught in the middle of it.
The app which I would build would make every smartphone a real time drought monitoring station. Most drought data is gathered using miles-apart weather stations that are slow to be updated. The gap between what the data says and what is actually happening on the ground is where the response is always behind. The app would use sensors on phones, location data and crowdsourced reporting to create a real time map of drought conditions block by block. Residents log what they see, dry wells, cracked soil, dead vegetation, failed crops and the app aggregates it into something governments and farmers can actually use the same day. Better data based on collection on a faster timeline and open data sharing is the thing drought response is missing most.
An app that I can make is a wind and moisture field mapping, which would tell site managers where exactly water loss is occurring before drought conditions take hold. Witnessing the effects of wind stripping moisture from agricultural areas and sites with every WeatherSolve Structures project I have become aware that the wind not only carries away the dust, but it also sucks water from soil faster than any extended period of being dry. Almost all plans for response to drought do not account for this. Real-time wind speed & direction superimposed over soil moisture data would provide high-light areas where wind driven evaporation is a cause of faster moving water loss, and from information gathered from our projects, we have determined that upwards of 40% of soil moisture is lost to wind-driven evaporation from exposed surfaces, providing site managers with an early warning before compounding damage has occurred. From there, the app recommends where a wind fence placement would purchase the most water retention per acre, which is a fix that costs far less than emergency irrigation, and helps fix the root cause of the problem, instead of the symptom. Drought planning with no consideration of wind is only addressing half of the issue.
I would build a simple app to enable people use greywater again. That is water that generally travels directly down the drain from sinks, showers, or washing machines. You might use it to water plants or gardens instead. Many people want to try this but don't know how to begin. It's also hard to understand because the rules are different in each city. The program would guess how much greywater a residence makes every day. It might also explain local restrictions, recommend plants that do well with greywater, and direct them to nearby installers. People don't realize that a lot of useable water is wasted every day. If more people reused some of that water, gardens could stay alive during drought without needing more water from the city.
If I were tasked to build the drought app, I would NOT build an IoT water-usage device. Instead, I would build an AI threat intel tool that helps protect key water infrastructure projects from bot-driven disinformation campaigns. It's often hard for tech founders to understand the real key to unlocking environmental issues: It's the manufactured outrage. When large drought-saving projects are proposed, desalination, water recycling, mandates on water use, etc, they often get stomped by seemingly grassroots outrage that looks like it comes from local communities, but in practice tries to derail the project entirely. The app would use threat intel network analytics to try to discern whether the outrage is real or fake. At Ringy, as we scale CRM/tech ops, we are always battling to separate the real signals from bots and noise, and these issues are weaponized to attack both public policy and tech strategy. And we've recently seen this type of thing happen in the corporate world, too, with the Cracker Barrel brand refresh. The purported consumer revolt triggered a 10.5% dip (around $100M in market cap impact) that caused Cracker Barrel to stomp on their brand refresh initiative. However, when analyzed, nearly 45% of the initial posts and 21% of the profiles that drove the boycott were actually bots that created this targeted, intentional attack. The same thing happens to climate initiatives all the time. My drought saver app would scrape social listening data, then parse for all the indicators that it's fake — there's a sudden spike of negative sentiment coming from accounts with zero history, opposition hashtags dominate, and they're posting identical messaging targeting local politicians. This software would help me as a tech startup founder trying to deploy environmental tech, and as a public official, to understand correctly if there's real community consensus, or if there's manufactured outrage. This way, not every water infrastructure project gets stomped by fake online revolt, but rather this outrage can be assessed, consensus can be built, and the tech can be deployed to save us from drought.