A glass of water
Picture a glass of water. Hold the glass up to the light and look closely.
Can you tell me what’s in the water?
Neither can I. Neither can your doctor, your mayor, your water utility or the company building a data center down the road. Not by looking. Not by tasting. Not by smelling.
Now think about how much of your life runs through that glass. The coffee you drank this morning. The food on your plate tonight. The electricity charging your phone, and the chips inside the phone. The hospital where you were born. The school down the street. Your own body, which is about 60 percent water.
Water is in all of it. And almost none of us can see what’s in our water.
For nine years, I’ve followed one question wherever the water led: What’s In Your Water? That one question has taken me everywhere water goes.
Following the water
Water never stays in one place. Follow water long enough, and you won’t either.
When I started Aquagenuity® in 2017, I began getting emails from fifth graders in South Georgia. They were worried about pollution from the nuclear facilities near their school, and they wanted to know what was in their water. A few years later, at Dobson Elementary in Atlanta, a class of fifth graders typed their ZIP code into our app and saw what was in their water, summed up in one number at the top of the screen, the way a forecast sums up the weather. They went home and told their parents. Those fifth graders showed me what happens when people can finally see what’s in their water: they act.
Following the water took me into classrooms, where students tested the water from their own school fountains and their own kitchen taps, and asked better questions than most adults ever do.
It took me through Flint, Michigan, where families drank water for a year and a half before anyone with authority admitted what was in the water.
It took me back to Love Canal in 1978, where families in Niagara Falls, New York, learned their neighborhood had been built on top of a buried chemical dump. President Jimmy Carter declared the first federal emergency in American history for a disaster that nature didn’t cause. Two years later, he signed the Superfund Act.
It took me to Camp Lejeune, where Marines and their families drank contaminated water for more than three decades. For most of those years, the only alarm system was the people themselves, getting sick.
It took me to islands that draw almost all of their drinking water from underground, where every decision made on the surface eventually reaches the water below.
It took me to the towns where AI data centers are rising, where a single campus can use as much water in a day as a small town, and where almost no one tests the water before the ground breaks.
And it brought me home to Atlanta, where a river named Flint (a different Flint) begins in pipes buried beneath the runways of one of the busiest airports in the world. Whatever washes off those runways and the roads around them, from fuel residue to deicing fluid, can run straight into the headwaters of a river that farms and communities across southwest Georgia depend on.
A classroom. A city. A neighborhood. A military base. An island. A data center. An airport. Different people, different problems, different decades. Every one of those water stories is different, but each is connected by the same thread: the water changes before anyone can see the change, and the people who drink the water are the last to know.
The UN just said it out loud
On November 2, 2026, the United Nations put a name to the thread running through all of those stories.
In a report drawn from UN teams in 17 countries, UN-Water called water a “superconnector”: the resource underneath public health, food and energy security, climate resilience and economic development. Then UN-Water named the problem. The connections are increasingly recognized, the report found, but they are “not consistently translated into joint programmes, investments and action.” The UN’s call is to move from “systems thinking” to “systems doing.”
At Aquagenuity®, we’ve said the same idea in three words for years: We Are Water.
The UN now recognizes that water connects everything. Most of the world doesn’t live or plan that way yet. And nobody can coordinate around water they can’t see. Today, government agencies, cities, companies and schools each see only a sliver of the picture: one test here, one report there, one crisis at a time. Nobody has the whole picture. Until somebody does, the water stays invisible, and problems nobody can see never get solved.
We track the weather, our credit and the air. Not our water.
Think about the systems you trust every day without a second thought.
You check the weather before you leave the house. A lender reads your credit score in seconds. Your phone shows the air quality index. Earthquake early warning systems send an alert before the ground starts shaking. Traffic maps reroute you around a crash as the crash happens. During the pandemic, cities tested people by the millions to see an outbreak coming before the hospitals filled.
Weather, money, air, the ground, the roads, disease. Every one of those systems has an intelligence layer: a way to see what’s happening and decide what to do next.
Now think about the water coming out of your tap. What tells you when your water changes?
Too often, the alert system for water is a sick child. A rash nobody can explain. A cluster of illnesses on one street. A headline, months or years after the water changed. Humans should not be the sensors alerting us to water quality problems.
Not knowing what’s in our water is expensive. In the U.S. alone, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that American communities need more than $1 trillion in water infrastructure investment over the next 20 years. Worldwide, the World Economic Forum estimates that $13.2 trillion in water infrastructure investment will be needed by 2040. Funding hasn’t kept pace, and the money that is being spent goes out without a shared, location-level picture of what’s in the water. When contamination is found too late, cities pay for emergency repairs instead of planned ones, construction projects stall while the water is retested, and families stop trusting the utility that serves them.
When no one can see what’s in the water, no one can plan for the risks.
Three things
So here is what we’re building. Three things.
People. Students, teachers and families who collect drinking water samples where they live, at the tap, the one place the data has always been missing.
Devices. Test kits, sensors and certified labs that measure what’s in every sample, so every reading rolls up into one number anyone can understand: a credit score for water quality.
Signals. Alerts that reach a community within hours, not years, when the water changes, along with what to do next.
People. Devices. Signals.
On their own, each one is useful. Together, they become something the world has never had: an intelligence network for water. People test. Devices measure. Signals alert. And each part makes the others stronger: the more people test, the more accurate the score becomes, and the more accurate the score, the sooner the next family is alerted.
All three run on one engine. We call the engine GAIA™, and GAIA™ stands on four pillars:
- Gathering: we bring together people, data and technology from all over the world, as a neutral third party that takes no sides and is loyal only to the best data.
- Analysis: we set a baseline for every location, catch changes early and learn what works.
- Intelligence: we turn the analysis into one score and clear recommendations for each location.
- Alert + Action: we tell people when their water changes and point them to the next step.
We call the people Guardians of H2O™. We call the score the AquaScore™. And we call the alerts AquaAlert™.
Built like water
We didn’t design the network like a machine. We designed the network to behave the way water does.
Water never moves through a single channel. Water gathers from countless sources, rises and falls with the seasons, and finds its way to wherever it’s needed. Our network works the same way.
It starts with a student asking a question at her own kitchen tap. Her result is mapped alongside thousands of others, and together those results show what’s in the water across a neighborhood, a city and a country. Where the readings point to a need, a local project forms to meet that need, with funding behind the project and results measured over time.
In her classroom, our Guardians of H2O™ program, inspired by Model United Nations, teaches the same student to see the world through the lens of water, because water isn’t a theme for one year or a subject for one classroom. She learns how the water in her glass connects to the food she eats, the power her city runs on and her family’s health. Then she goes back to her tap with sharper questions.
Water moves in cycles, and so does the network. Activity peaks in testing season each spring and carries on through analysis, projects and lessons the rest of the year, the way a river rises and falls but never stops moving. Every part feeds the others, the way streams feed a river. And each season leaves the whole network more accurate than the season before.
The UN calls water the “superconnector.” Intelligence makes those connections visible. Leadership turns them into action.
Why Atlanta. Why 2027.
Atlanta has been leading on water for the last 50 years.
In 1977, President Carter signed the Clean Water Act of 1977, and Andrew Young, then Atlanta’s congressman and a leader of the civil rights movement, was appointed by President Carter as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Years later, the Carter Center took on Guinea worm, a parasite people catch from contaminated drinking water. In 1986, Guinea worm disease affected 3.5 million people a year. Community by community, village by village, the Carter Center’s campaign brought the number down to a handful. No single breakthrough beat Guinea worm. Decades of community engagement did, one village and one day at a time. Aquagenuity® is building the same kind of network for water, everywhere.
2027 is the year to write the next chapter, in the same city. Ambassador Young turns 95 in March, the same month the world marks UN World Water Day. In December, the nation marks the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act of 1977. Between those two milestones, Atlanta will host a year of work centering clean water initiatives, and students and families across the country will collect drinking water samples for a national baseline, starting in Georgia.
The last chapter was about getting water to people. The next chapter is about letting people see what’s in their water.
We Are Water
Now look again at that glass of water.
The water in your glass has been everywhere. The water has been rain over the ocean, a river under an airport, groundwater beneath an island, a cooling tower at a data center and a fountain in a school hallway. The water in your glass has touched every one of the stories I’ve told you. And the water will keep moving long after we’re gone.
We are not separate from the water. We are made of water. Our cities, our companies, our food and our future are all powered by water. We Are Water.
Which is why the right to know what’s in our water belongs to everyone. Not to one agency, one company or one country. Everyone. People have a right to know what’s in the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Water is not a political issue. It's a human issue.
So here is my invitation.
- If you lead a school, bring Guardian Season into your classrooms, and let your students become the first scientists in their family.
- If you lead a university, verify the data, model the risks and publish the research the world is missing.
- If you lead a company, fund the projects and the data infrastructure that every one of your operations already depends on.
- If you lead a city, an agency or a nation, pilot location-level water intelligence and use one shared aggregate score across every department that touches water.
- And if you drink water, become a Guardian. Together, we change the world one drop at a time.
Every solution starts with knowing what’s in the water. And knowing starts with one person, at one tap, asking one question:
What’s In Your Water?
Sources
- UN-Water, Water as a Superconnector: UN Country Coordination and Integration, November 2, 2026.
- U.S. EPA, 7th Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment and Clean Watersheds Needs Survey.
- World Economic Forum, Why water is the catalyst for the next wave of global growth, January 2026.
AquaScore™, AquaAlert™, Guardians of H2O™ and GAIA™ are trademarks of Aquagenuity, Inc. © 2026 Aquagenuity, Inc. All rights reserved.