A row of bulbous steel digesters dominates Hamburg’s waterfront desalination and wastewater complex—an emblem of the land-based, energy-hungry infrastructure that emerging floating, zero-energy solar stills aim to replace.
A New Hope for Water-Scarce Regions
On May 12, 2025, at the Expo 2025 in Osaka, an Emirati startup named Manhat made headlines by winning a prestigious Best Practices Award. Manhat’s innovation – a passive, solar-driven floating desalination system – promises to produce fresh water from the sea without any external energy or carbon emissions. For policymakers and climate-focused investors, this development couldn’t be timelier. In an era of megadroughts and mounting water scarcity,
