Turn on a tap in Toronto or Chicago, and clean water feels like a certainty. Travel just a few hours down the road, however, and that is not the case. Across Canada and the United States, there are many communities that continue to face drinking water advisories, leaving people to boil their water or drink bottled water.
In 2025, Canada reported nearly 40 active long-term drinking water advisories in First Nations and rural communities alongside hundreds of short-term notices, while in the United States, over 10,000 public water systems faced health-based violations.
Risk exists along the entire chain, from the source all the way through degrading distribution pipes to the tap. Add to that aging infrastructure, service disruptions, contamination risks, and growing pressure from floods, droughts, and extreme weather, the water systems underlying our communities are stretched to the limit.
Across the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence basin, true resilience isn't measured by how much water surrounds us, but whether our infrastructure, treatment, and distribution systems hold up when under pressure.
To tackle this water access gap, AquaHacking teams are working with three Water Issue Leaders with expertise across Indigenous water governance, municipal infrastructure, and local climate policy:
Across their mentorship sessions and webinars, three core themes surfaced.
Rebuilding trust through Indigenous-led governance
Equitable water access is deeply rooted in the history of its governance and trust. When drinking water advisories persist, it is often due to overly complex infrastructure reliant on external technicians, rigid funding models, or past breakdowns in trust. True resilience requires "Two-Eyed Seeing", combining Indigenous Knowledge and Western science to create community-driven and culturally relevant solutions. For innovators, that changes the starting question. Rather than asking, How can we bring this technology to a community? The question becomes: What does this community need, and can we build the solution with them? Instead of imposing utility models onto small populations, innovators must focus on co-designed, community-scale systems that build local sovereignty and are actually manageable over the long haul.
Designing for the worst day of the year
For municipal infrastructure, resilience comes down to a simple stress test: what happens when everything goes wrong at once? Water infrastructure is often invisible—until it fails. A single main break can flood entire neighborhoods in minutes, while a sudden power outage can strip a plant of its ability to treat drinking water safely. Risk also hides along the "long line" between the source and the tap, where treated water can easily be re-contaminated during truck transport, storage in household cisterns, or passage through degrading distribution pipes.
Rebuilding urban water systems from scratch is financially impossible for most cities, which makes "infrastructure-light" innovations so vital. Smarter retrofits, passive flow controls, and tools that flag invisible contaminants early give municipalities ways to protect public health without needing a multi-billion-dollar budget. The goal is not the infrastructure that never encounters stress. It is the infrastructure capable of anticipating, adapting to, and recovering from it.
Closing the capacity gap in local government
Sometimes the barrier to innovation and climate adaptation is not a lack of solutions. It is a lack of capacity to implement them. Even when local leaders want to adapt, small public works departments usually lack the hands, knowledge, or budget to make it happen. Operators end up stuck putting out daily fires instead of planning for tomorrow's climate risks. Powerful software, natural asset frameworks, and green bonds exist, but small teams rarely have a dedicated specialist to run them.
A solution that requires expertise, time, or resources a community does not have will struggle to create impact. And this creates a different kind of innovation challenge: How do we make resilience easier to act on? Breakthroughs happen when we strip away that administrative friction, creating simple, straightforward tools that already busy municipal teams can actually adopt and maintain. The most impactful solution is one that communities can actually adopt, operate, and sustain.
Multiple teams of the AquaHacking Binational Challenge presented innovative solutions to this complex issue during the Semi-Final. Although not every team moved forward to the grand finale in Detroit, the support AquaAction gives them does not stop there. All willing participants of the Challenge gain access to the AquaNation community, AquaAction's community of water-tech companies and innovators.
One truly binational team, bringing together members from Quebec and Michigan, is continuing to develop its solution for water access and community resilience.
Featured Innovator: Team Lapara
Team LAPARA is developing a digital geospatial platform that will enable the measurement, forecasting, and management of drought and water stress risks in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River basin. The methodology is based on an integrated approach combining geomatics, hydrology, hydrogeology, climate analysis, and socioeconomic data to produce a Territorial Water Resilience Index (TWRI). The goal is to turn complex information into something communities can use: a clearer picture of where vulnerabilities exist, how risks may evolve, and where action could have the greatest impact.
To learn more about all of the teams in this year's Challenge, visit: https://aquaaction.org/aquahacking-binational-teams
Although the challenges rising for this issue vary, taken together, they point to the same conclusion. Freshwater abundance does not equal water security, not for a First Nation waiting decades for a boil water advisory to lift, and not for a city bracing for the next storm.
By building trust, strengthening local capacity, and designing for real-world stress, these innovators are ensuring our water systems don't just survive on their worst days, it is about building communities and water systems that are ready when conditions are anything but ideal.
Join us on November 5th for the Binational Finale to discover the finalist solutions live: https://aquaaction.org/en/our-programs/aquahacking-challenge/binational-finale-2026