Khalifa University professor and sustainable water technology start-up founder Saeed Alhassan recently made the journey to Osaka, Japan, to share his company’s vision at Expo 2025.
Manhat, which is dedicated to sustainable fresh water and waterborne – or “floating” – farm solutions, was featured during a discussion on ecological innovation earlier in the week at the UAE Pavilion inside the international expo site.
This comes several months after Mr Alhassan and Manhat were one of 25 start-ups from around the world to win a Best Practices Award for Expo 2025 celebrating efforts to tackle global challenges.
“It’s great to be a part of this engine of progress in the UAE and helping to make air a global driver of sustainability initiatives,” he said at the UAE Pavilion.
“Being recognised among the dreamers who do is an honour for me.”
In 2022, Manhat announced that it had created a device using proprietary technology to generate fresh water from the ocean without using electricity, addressing a major hurdle as the Arabian Gulf seeks ways to ensure water and food security.
“Water basically evaporates from the bottom side,” Mr Alhassan told The National during a 2022 interview, explaining the device.
“And then it goes up and it fills this sphere, and when the night comes and the temperature drops, then the water condenses inside and gets collected in this reservoir.”
Mr Alhassan has continued to promote his device’s potential, pointing out that the current desalination methods used by regions of water scarcity are often energy intensive, and in some cases, have the potential to create more pollution.
He is working to manufacture Manhat's devices in a way that gets them to a better price point and eventually make them accessible to the mass market.
While it fine-tunes its prototypes and works on other water solutions, Manhat has also filed patents for floating farm solutions that integrate the company's devices that will allow for the production of food, even if sea levels continue to rise as a result of climate change.
According to the UN, of the 17 most water-stressed countries in the world, 11 are in the Middle East and North Africa, making it one of the most affected regions in the world.
