Public Funding for Yellow Sub Geo Ltd

Water is our most precious of shared resources and any decision regarding its abstraction, storage and discharge has important implications for all stakeholders both within a given catchment area, and for those within adjoining catchments down-stream. For increasingly water-contingent industry and agriculture, which collectively account for between 80-90% of total accessible freshwater usage on earth, the true scale of the challenge is emerging into sharp focus. As rapid population growth and climate change exert yet more pressure on water demand, the need to make faster, better-informed and more strategic decisions about how we manage water becomes more acute. Water balance models are currently used by specialists to underpin decisions about the availability of water in the future, and to inform decisions about the adequacy of the infrastructure to manage future supply and demand. These water-balance models are notoriously slow to build, and stakeholder engagement is ineffective. Better decisions require better decision-making tools, available in useful timescales and critically, involving a wide range of stakeholders. How long does it currently take to reliably and accurately understand and forecast water balance within a given catchment? 6 months? Maybe a year? Sometimes 3 years plus? How does tomorrow sound to you instead? Yellow Sub Hydro is an integrated catchment scale water balance modelling and stakeholder communication platform. It provides a quick, accurate and flexible way of presenting the complexity of environmental data so that it is both understandable and useful to technical and non-technical users alike. This alone is a huge step forward but it's also just the beginning. The wider purpose is to help all stakeholders make better, faster and more transparent decisions about water and thereby allow the heaviest consumers (e.g. industry and agriculture) meet their legal, environmental and social obligations whilst also underpinning strategy to meet their practical and financial needs. For heavily regulated and water-intensive industries, where substantial long-term capital investment is essential, such water-balance models are both highly valuable as well as a legal/ regulatory requirement in most cases.

The post COVID-19 challenge is to build-back-better. Yellow Sub Hydro will instigate a step-change in the way the global mining industry manages our most precious of finite resources - water. United Nations research suggests more than half of the global population will be exposed to severe water scarcity within the next four decades as a result of both climate change and growing demand. We all have a stake in ensuring water is used ethically, responsibly and sustainably. One of the most water-intensive industries is the metals and mining sector, where no water literally means no business. Mine operators rely on 'water-balance' models to underpin many of their strategic decisions and risk management. These are mathematical representations of the way the water cycles from precipitation through the ground before ultimately leaving the local system via an outflowing river. The current state-of-the-art water-balance modelling typically takes a team of highly specialised hydrogeologists 1-3 years and up to a million dollars for a single mine site (there are tens of thousands of mine sites globally). Our idea is to use digital and machine learning technology, together with proprietary algorithms to reduce the modelling output into near real time, whilst losing none of the accuracy. Yellow Sub Hydro aims to help mining companies meet their environmental and social obligations (and their licence to operate) at the same time as saving them time and money. The innovation we are delivering will promote circular economy by providing a new landscape for other advances in efficiency and impact reduction from mining operations. For us, driving a sustainability agenda and making an impact socially and environmentally as well as economically has huge appeal, and we envisage this manifesting through driving a step-change in water resource management across a globally important industry.