IWRM Karlsruhe 2012

Review IWRM 2012

IWRM Karlsruhe 2012 has come to a successful close. Over 450 participants from 33 countries visited the Integrated Water Resources Management conference with parallel trade fair. An additional 250 participants attended the accompanying delegation events on country-specific water topics, for example, in Indonesia, the Lower Jordan Valley, Central Asia or South East Europe. “The marvellous response from experts and professional visitors who travelled here from every continent demonstrates the great significance and importance of the topic of sustainable water supply, in relation to which many renowned institutions, organisations and companies in the Karlsruhe Technology Region are doing research and developing technologies,” says Britta Wirtz, the managing director of Karlsruher Messe- und Kongress-GmbH. Karlsruhe thus became a hub for the exchange of ideas and information between international water experts.

The IWRM participants were particularly enthusiastic about the integration of conference and trade fair: “The conference program proved to be a well-accepted mixture of theory and practice. The exhibitors of system solutions for IWRM were also very satisfied,” says Professor Hartwig Steusloff, Chairman of the IWRM Karlsruhe Advisory Board and Authorised Advisor to the Fraunhofer IOSB Management Team.

The exhibitors also expressed their satisfaction with IWRM Karlsruhe 2012: “The IWRM has a very interested audience who ask many probing questions. The event does an excellent job of bringing together various companies and disciplines. The many different sectors make the IWRM an ideal platform for evaluating the individual topics and projects in an integrated manner and for positioning them on the market,” explains Markus Bayer, Sales Director for Germany at Roediger Vacuum GmbH.

On 21 November, NEO2012, the innovation prize of the Technology Region Karlsruhe (TRK), endowed with €20,000, was awarded as part of IWRM Karlsruhe 2012. It went to UNISENSOR Sensorsysteme GmbH. This company, in cooperation with the Water Technology Center (TZW), developed the online analysis system “ORGANOTRACE 100”, which can detect organic trace elements in water within fractions of a second.

The next IWRM Karlsruhe takes place from the 19th to the 20th of November 2014.