GWPP at the IWA World Water Congress and Exhibition, Brisbane, Australia

Authors and editors from the GWPP network were in attendance at the IWA World Water Congress and Exhibition in Brisbane, Australia October 9^th to 14^th and participated in two workshops related to the GWPP mission. In the first workshop, which was chaired by Günter Langergraber (BOKU University, Austria) and Susan Petterson (GWPP Case Studies Group Editor), panelists Darryl Jackson (WHO consultant), Joan Rose (Lead GWPP Editor), David Cunliffe (Health Australia), and Gertjan Medema (GWPP Case Studies Group Editor) presented practical experiences for implementing the WHO’s Sanitation Safety Planning framework and demonstrated how the information being produced by the GWPP will help sanitation safety planners use quantitative microbial risk assessment methods to evaluate sanitation technologies for achieving health-based targets.

In the second workshop, organized by Joan Rose, members of the GWPP user community gathered to discuss pathogen data needs for their practical applications. The user community participants in attendance included government employees and water reuse regulators, entrepreneurs, engineering consultants, as well as researchers and scientists. Members of the GWPP network in attendance included Warish Ahmed (Indicators Group), Andreas Farnleitner (Indicators Group), Hiroyuki Katayama (Virus Group), Karl Linden (Disinfection Technologies Group), Gertjan Medema, Susan Petterson, Jack Schijven (Indicators Group), and Matthew Verbyla (Sanitation Technologies Group).
The following are some of the lessons learned from GWPP’s participation in these two workshops:

Users want to know about environmental, operational, and design factors that affect pathogen removal, fate and transport in sanitation and wastewater reuse systems.
Users also want to know what indicators or surrogates they can use to ensure pathogens are being removed in their systems.
Some members of the user community who were more accustomed to working in data-scarce and resource-limited settings had trouble seeing the usefulness of the information being generated by GWPP.
The GWPP sanitation and disinfection technologies chapters as well as the case studies will be key components of the project top demonstrate how the information can be used; the case studies in particular will show how the information can be used for evidence-based quantitative microbial risk assessments.