They project responses to the scarcity of water and food – La Discusión 2024-02-23 07:32:43

With the participation of national experts, as well as those from Morocco and Finland, the second version of the Future Congress was developed in the Ñuble region, which with the motto “What do we do now?”, focused on visualizing how Artificial Intelligence can help address water and food shortages

The activity, carried out at the Virginio Gómez Institute, in Chillán, was organized by the Regional Government of Ñuble together with the universities of Concepción (UdeC), Bío-Bío (UBB) and Católica de la Santísima Concepción (UCSC). Local authorities and researchers attended, as well as entrepreneurs, teachers, students and representatives of the public world.

The exhibition, “Water at risk: securing the future in the climate crisis”, was led by water resources engineer Charafat Afailal, from Morocco, where she analyzed the management of water resources in a context of scarcity following her time as minister in charge of water in Morocco.

Then, the Finnish Arttu Luukanen, physicist and doctor in Applied Physics, presented “Foods of the future: can we replace meat with proteins made from air?”, in which he recounted the experience of Solar Foods, a company – of which he is vice president senior- which manufactures Solein, a microbial protein, using only hydrogen, CO2 and electricity.

Afterwards, a panel of national experts addressed the issues with a local perspective, in a conversation moderated by the journalist and director of the newspaper La Discusión, Francisco Martinic. José Luis Arumí, director of the Department of Water Resources at the UdeC and principal researcher at Crhiam, participated; Mario Pérez Won, food engineer, master in Fisheries Sciences and academic at the UBB; and Guillermo Medina, Doctor in Analytical Sciences and Technology and professor at UCSC.

The professionals highlighted the work being carried out on the study of aquifers, food freeze-drying projects and data analysis on water quality, research that is being led by the Ñuble study houses.

In Dr. Arumí’s opinion, “the similarities between the Arab world and Chile are quite interesting. We share the Mediterranean climate, the same condition, basically we have much more rain in winter and water scarcity in summer (…) Chile is among the 20 countries with the greatest water stress, of course, one says but we do have water, but if we consider From Santiago to the north, the driest city in the world is Iquique, so, in that sense, part of what was presented is the issue of governance, infrastructure and cooperation, which is key.”

From the point of view of water quality, Dr. Medina stated, “if we talk about climate change in general and the effects it is leaving with respect to the availability of water, which we already know we do not have much of at the country level, What little we have we must also try to worry about the quality of the water with respect to the use of irrigation, such as drinking water and in that sense my line of research and that of the University has been focused on that area and Artificial Intelligence is playing a super important role in that, in the rapid and efficient monitoring of water quality.”

Regarding the foods of the future, Professor Pérez Won recalled that “we were very recently at NASA learning about what they do and the last thing they had was freeze-drying, which was in the 70s and from there nothing new had come out, and now, with this new technology (Solein) you can really explore space.”

For his part, the governor of Ñuble, Óscar Crisóstomo, maintained that “innovation, future thinking and how we generate new capabilities are axes that we are working on as a Regional Government, so for us it is very important to be able to host, for the second consecutive year, of the Future Congress, an instance that allows us to have the best minds in the world in our country, in our region, opening the discussion to relevant topics.”