FairWater

Every drop accounted for.

FairWater works to promote fair and optimal water distribution across national borders.

The Nile feeds 500 million people across 11 countries. Every year, decisions about dam releases, irrigation allocations, and reservoir schedules are made with incomplete information, and the consequences ripple downstream for decades. Droughts worsen. Crops fail. Cities run dry.

FairWater makes those consequences visible before the decision is made.

The Problem

Water policy in shared river basins, like the Nile, is one of the hardest coordination problems in the world. The tradeoffs are real and often brutal:

• Hold back water in Ethiopia for hydropower, and Egypt's farms get less irrigation.
• Release early for agriculture, and reservoirs run low when drought hits.
• Prioritize cities, and food production drops.

These decisions are currently made with spreadsheets, political pressure, and guesswork, without proper international cooperation and without tools that all parties can trust equally.

Our Solution

FairWater produces a decision support tool: A digital twin for river systems and an optimisation algorithm. Not only is this a what-if sandbox that lets anyone see the downstream consequences of a water decision, but our optimisation algorithm can find the optimal use of water, including risk for drought and food and deficiency. The product uses EU space data and signals at its core: Open, fair and scientific.

We bring together satellite data, physics-based simulation, and optimisation into a single platform that can be deployed on any river basin in the world. The goal is simple: make the tradeoffs visible!

Our solution assembles various kinds of technologies that enables a rapid deployment into any river system in the world. The goal is to make tradeoffs legible to decision-makers, citizens, and negotiators alike.

The Nile is only our starting point. The platform is designed to generalize to any river basin in the world. Because we rely exclusively on open satellite data, it can be deployed anywhere without depending on local data infrastructure or national data-sharing agreements.

Potential investors

We built FairWater for the people in the room when hard water decisions get made.

• International organizations such as the UN, the World Bank, and regional river basin bodies working to prevent water conflicts and support cooperative agreements.
• Foreign aid and development programs that need rigorous, defensible impact assessments for water infrastructure investments.
• National governments and ministries managing shared watercourses and needing decision support they can stand behind in public.
• Hydropower companies and water utilities seeking to optimize operations while demonstrating that they respect downstream obligations.

If you work in any of these spaces, FairWater was built with you in mind.

What Makes Us Different

We only use open satellite data.

Our ground truth comes from the EU Copernicus programme, which is free, independent, and trusted by scientists worldwide. We combine:

• ERA5 historical climate reanalysis covering 20 years of validated forcings.
• Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to observe real crop health and irrigation across the basin.
• A physics-based river model calibrated against measured discharge data.
• Copernicus Sentinel‑3 altimetry to estimate current reservoir and lake levels.
• Copernicus Land Monitoring Service data derived from Sentinel‑2 to track current crop conditions and production indicators.

No proprietary data. No black-box algorithms. Every number is traceable back to its source.

This matters deeply for diplomacy. When Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt sit at the same table, they need a shared fact base, not competing national models built on contested assumptions. FairWater is designed to be that neutral ground.

The Opportunity

The World Bank finances over 26 billion dollars in water infrastructure annually, and every project needs credible impact assessment. There are 11 countries in the Nile basin, 500 million people depending on the river, and currently no shared simulation platform. Climate volatility is making existing allocation agreements more fragile every year, and international pressure for transparent, data-driven water governance is growing fast.

Because we rely entirely on open satellite data, the platform can scale to any basin in the world, from the Mekong to the Colorado, without renegotiating data access with any government.

The Team

FairWater was built by a five-person team with backgrounds in hydrology, data engineering, mathematical modeling, and economics. The team has the right technical qualification to make FairWater happen, and has already made a minimal viable product.

Emilio Lombardo studies industrial mathematics and contributes to the mathematical modeling and numerical methods underpinning the simulation engine.

Storm Selvig is a data engineering student responsible for backend infrastructure, data architecture, and the systems that make large-scale satellite data processable in real time.

Daniel Lindestad holds a master's degree in business administration with a specialization in analytical finance, and is currently completing a degree in computer engineering, focusing on applied machine learning. He bridges the technical and policy dimensions of the platform and leads product development and stakeholder communication.

Bernt Viggo Matheussen holds a PhD in hydrological modeling and brings deep expertise in river systems and water resource simulation. He provides the scientific foundation that keeps the platform grounded in physical reality.

Jonas Tjemsland holds a PhD in Theoretical Astroparticle Physics. He leads data pipeline development and the integration of satellite and climate datasets, applying rigorous quantitative methods to real-world water systems.

Minimum Viable Product

FairWater has built a working digital twin of the Nile basin, covering 13 major nodes from Lake Victoria and Lake Tana to the Aswan reservoir and the Nile Delta, including the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Our platform has three integrated layers:

The hydrology model  is the core of our digital twin, purpose‑built to simulate the inflow into every water‑dependent region of a river basin. This inflow modeling capability is what drives the accuracy and usefulness of our scenario engine: by understanding how much water enters each reservoir, irrigation district, hydropower plant, or regional zone, we can meaningfully explore how climate variability, land‑use change, and human operations shape water availability across the entire system. The hydrology model can generate historical scenarios, or convert weather forecast data into inflow forecasts. 

The riversystem simulation engine models daily water flows through the entire basin. For every day in a scenario it computes reservoir storage, hydropower generation, downstream releases, irrigation delivery, drinking water supply, and spillage at each node. The physics are grounded in real data: 70 years of historical discharge records, ERA5 climate reanalysis from the EU Copernicus programme and satellite-derived evaporation estimates. The engine runs in milliseconds, fast enough to power interactive state-of-the-art optimisation algorithms and machine learning techniques.

The optimisation engine uses a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (NSGA-II) to search the space of possible operating policies, and our modular approach allows for an easy integration of alternative techniques. It makes tradeoffs explicit: Decision-makers see the full landscape of consequences before choosing.

On top of these two engines sits an interactive dashboard: a map of the basin, sliders for release policies and demand parameters, and live KPI readouts for drinking-water reliability, food production in tonnes, and hydropower output. A scenario can be saved, shared, and compared side by side with any other.

Everything runs on open data. No proprietary datasets. No national data-sharing agreements required. The same stack can be deployed on the Mekong, the Colorado, or any other transboundary basin.

Get In Touch

We are looking for partners, pilots, and institutions ready to bring satellite-grounded water intelligence into the room where decisions are made.

For more information: https://demofairwater.eu