On April 8th – 10th 2019 the Global Water Summit returned to London, one of the great world cities. Focusing on the theme of Disruptive Designs the Summit successfully delivered a full program of sessions and networking, offering delegates a truly global overview of the water sector, supporting their business goals for 2019/2020 and beyond.

Read more about what happened during GWS 2019 in GWI Publisher Christopher Gasson’s column “Eight things I learned at the Global Water Summit”:

Senior executives from over 200 companies and 50 countries joined us in London for 3 days of intense discussions and a whirlwind of sessions.

The summit this year saw the most one-to-one networking ever, with over 1100 confirmed one-to-one meetings taking place. Below you can see the full network chart of all meetings that happened during GWS 2019, with each node representing a single company and the size of each node corresponding to how many delegates they brought to the summit. You can click on each node to isolate its part of the full network.

This year the Summit held 14 sessions during the sessions agenda, grouped under 8 strands. The tree diagram below shows which sessions were the most popular amongst our delegates based on data from the GWS App.

This year the Summit hosted 50 roundtable discussions. The wordcloud below shows what was discussed during the roundtables sessions on Day 1 and 2.

Members of the audience were asked to participate in voting on various questions during the Summit to aid panel discussions and get a sesnse of what the global water industry thinks about various issues. You can find some of the results below.

This year we welcomed over 200 speakers to GWS, the list below shows which speakers were the most popular amongst our delegates based on data from the GWS app.

The Global Water Awards took place at the National History Museum in London on Day 1 of The Global Water Summit. 13 awards were presented to celebrate the greatest achievements over the previous year, rewarding the initiatives and companies in the water, wastewater and desalination sectors that are moving the industry forward through improved operating performance, innovative technology adoption and sustainable financial models.

Trophies were also presented to new members of the Leading Utilities of the World network. Membership in this network is a recognition that a utility is among the best in the world, based on relative improvement as much as absolute achievement. The five new members were accepted into the network in a meeting held at The Global Water Summit on 9th April where each presented their achievements to the network’s advisory board – all of whom also represent utilities that have an unimpeachable record of innovation and performance.