We asked 30 professionals across agriculture, tech, law, plumbing, and sustainability what app they would build to tackle drought. Their answers reveal that water scarcity is not just a climate problem — it's a data, coordination, and behavior problem.
Drought kills slowly. Reservoirs shrink by inches, wells drop by feet, and crops wither before governments declare emergencies. By the time restrictions land, months of preventable waste have already happened. What the world is missing, according to the professionals below, isn't necessarily more water — it's smarter systems for seeing, sharing, and acting on the water we already have.
From plumbers in Adelaide to legal practitioners in New York, 30 experts weighed in with app concepts that range from household leak detectors to AI-powered disinformation shields protecting water infrastructure from fake online revolts. The breadth of their answers is itself revealing: drought is everyone's problem, and nearly every industry has a piece of the solution.
Connect the Hardware That's Already There
One of the most practical observations in this collection comes from Daniel Vasilevski, Director of Pro Electrical, who argues the real problem isn't missing technology — it's disconnected technology.
"Most rural properties already have the hardware sitting there installed by different contractors at different times with no shared logic connecting any of it."
— Daniel Vasilevski, Director, Pro Electrical
His proposed app would unify soil probes, smart meters, and pump systems already on a property into one interface that auto-schedules irrigation around actual daily crop needs — no new infrastructure required. The same logic runs through the contribution from David Toby of Pathfinder Marketing, who envisions an app connecting councils, farms, and households — three groups that currently operate from completely separate datasets, creating waste not from bad intentions but from incomplete information.
Stop the Leaks You Don't Know About
Silent water loss is one of the most underappreciated drivers of household drought contribution. Caleb John, Director of Exceed Plumbing in Adelaide, has spent a decade finding dripping taps and running toilets that homeowners had no idea existed.
"The number of slow leaks, dripping taps and running toilets I've discovered and homeowners were completely unaware of is truly staggering — they're silent, continuous losses that accumulate over months."
— Caleb John, Director, Exceed Plumbing
His proposed app connects smart pipe sensors to a real-time dashboard, alerting homeowners the moment consumption exceeds their normal daily baseline and identifying exactly which zone in the house is responsible. Jeff Patten, Co-Founder of Flatiron Wines & Spirits, makes the same argument from a retail behavior angle: people only change habits when they see data in real time, not on a monthly bill. His concept translates smart meter data into hour-by-hour breakdowns by source — irrigation, laundry, shower, kitchen — showing exactly where water is going as it goes there.
Get the Right Data to Farmers Before 6am
Agriculture accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater use, and a significant portion of that is wasted through over-irrigation based on outdated or generalized data. Multiple contributors focused on closing this gap with field-level intelligence.
"The difference between a regional forecast and plot-level data is greater than most people imagine — farms using localized data reduce water use by 30–47% compared to those relying on generalized zone recommendations."
— Caleb Johnstone, SEO Director, Paperstack
Johnstone's proposed app generates hourly field-level irrigation schedules and sends plain-language alerts directly to a farmer's phone — something like "Field 3 is at 61% capacity, hold irrigation today" — removing the need for interpretation. Caitlin Agnew-Francis of Desky points to Australian research suggesting up to 50% of agricultural irrigation is wasted through overwatering, and argues that combining soil moisture sensors with weather forecasts into a single irrigation recommendation could be transformative. Matt Little, Founder of Festoon House, echoes this from experience managing large outdoor hospitality venues: "What actually is a solution to drought is not more data sitting in a dashboard. It's actionable data released directly to the person making the call, in real time."
Barbara Robinson of WeatherSolve Structures contributes two related ideas. Her wind and moisture field mapping concept addresses an underappreciated cause of soil water loss — wind-driven evaporation, which she estimates accounts for up to 40% of moisture loss from exposed surfaces. An app that overlays real-time wind data with soil moisture readings could identify where wind fencing would purchase the most water retention per acre, at far lower cost than emergency irrigation. Her second concept: a single-output app that distills soil moisture, evaporation rates, precipitation forecasts, and crop water requirements into one daily number per field zone, eliminating the need for farmers to juggle multiple government sites and weather apps before making an irrigation guess.
Bennett Barrier, CEO of DFW Turf Solutions, reinforces this from a landscaping perspective: most irrigation systems run on calendar timers, not soil reality. An app using root-level moisture sensors combined with local weather forecasts, he argues, would replace guesswork with data — and in a drought, the difference between those two things is where gardens and crops fail.
Neighborhood Alerts and Early Warnings
Bilal Amin, Founder of Three Stripes Digital, argues that the most practical drought app isn't a farm tool or a government dashboard — it's an early warning system at the neighborhood scale. His concept aggregates weather data, soil moisture readings, reservoir levels, and local water consumption to show residents a live picture of how close their area is to restriction conditions, before those restrictions arrive.
"The true value is to transform warnings received from a governmental agency into a daily decision-making tool for individuals and groups — allowing them to take collective action to reduce demand on available water supply."
— Bilal Amin, Founder, Three Stripes Digital
Michael Benoit, Founder of ContractorBond, pushes this further with a crowdsourced approach: turning every smartphone into a drought monitoring station. Residents log dry wells, cracked soil, dead vegetation, and failed crops, and the app aggregates these reports into a real-time block-by-block map that governments and farmers can use the same day. Dennis Holmes, CEO of Answer Our Phone, frames the same urgency through a unified data lens: drought conditions are typically addressed after they have already occurred, and a platform compiling weather data, reservoir levels, satellite imagery, and usage data into simple early alerts could shift communities from reactive to proactive. James Rigby, Director of Design Cloud, and Vasilii Kiselev, CEO of Legacy Online School, both advocate for cloud-connected IoT sensor networks that feed centralized dashboards — Kiselev's HydraNet concept using satellite data, weather monitoring, and AI to define exactly how much water exists in a given field area and where it will be needed next.
Build Water Markets and Recovery Networks
Several contributors argue that drought is fundamentally a coordination failure rather than a scarcity problem. Water often sits idle in one place while farmland nearby runs dry, with no infrastructure to move it.
"Drought is almost never about water being gone — it's about coordination failures between the people that have it and the people that need it."
— Teresa Tran, COO, LaGrande Marketing
Tran envisions a real-time water bank where municipalities, farms, and landowners post available water the way Airbnb hosts post rooms — with AI-driven pricing that adjusts hourly based on live availability. In California alone, she estimates 2.7 billion dollars' worth of tradeable water goes unmatched every dry season due to the absence of such a platform. Welly Mulia of CartMango proposes a local water marketplace modeled on ridesharing: connecting people with overflowing rain tanks or spare greywater to nearby buyers using the same location-and-behavior matching engine his company uses to process payments. Kiara DeWitt, Founder of Injectco, addresses the urban side with DropPin — an app that lets anyone pin a water waste event on a live map, triggering a recovery crew to capture and redirect it to the nearest farm, garden, or reservoir. Urban water waste in the US totals an estimated 900 billion gallons annually, she notes, almost all of it lost to storm sewers.
Cal Singh of Equipment Leasing Canada broadens the coordination argument beyond water itself: in conflict zones and areas hit by resource shortages, food, water, fuel, and medical supplies often exist but can't reach people because no single platform maps where they are. An app combining real-time supply tracking with open data sharing, he argues, could change outcomes for the people caught in the middle.
Greywater, Rainwater, and Reuse
Phoebe Mendez of Online Alarm Kur focuses on one of the simplest overlooked water sources: greywater from sinks, showers, and washing machines that most households send straight to the drain. Her proposed app would estimate daily greywater output, explain local reuse regulations, suggest suitable plants, and connect users to nearby installers. Patricia Curts, Managing Director of The Mexican Collection, makes the case for a Rainwater Harvesting Planner — a tool that takes a user's postcode, roof dimensions, and average rainfall to calculate exactly how many gallons per year are available overhead and what a collection system would cost and save.
"A 1,000 square foot roof receiving 30 inches of rain a year yields approximately 18,700 gallons — most people have no idea there is that number right above them."
— Patricia Curts, Managing Director, The Mexican Collection
Grantham Bettner of Behind The Scenes Productions in Phoenix brings an event-industry angle: large-scale events generate enormous amounts of greywater that currently goes to waste. His concept would use real-time sensor and event data to redirect that water to local farms, landscaping, or construction cooling systems through a marketplace model. Darryl Stevens, CEO of Digitech Web Design, advocates for hyperlocal IoT-powered soil moisture mapping at the square meter level, arguing that most drought responses are too broad and that "surgical irrigation" removing 30–50% of water waste requires knowing exactly which patch of land needs water and which doesn't.
Behavior Change, Rights, and Unconventional Angles
Meera Watts, CEO of Siddhi Yoga, takes the most unexpected approach in the collection. Rather than monitoring or infrastructure, she would build an app modeled on Pranayama breath practice — using breath-paced check-ins during high-water moments to make people consciously aware of habits they perform on autopilot.
"A better interface has never been the best weapon of permanent behavior change. It has always been a greater internal point of reference."
— Meera Watts, CEO and Founder, Siddhi Yoga
Adam Dayan, Founder of Consumer Law Group, approaches drought from a legal literacy standpoint: many people, including farmers, cannot navigate the systems controlling water distribution in their region, and an app clarifying local water levels, rights, restrictions, and usage rules could meaningfully improve planning and reduce conflict. Mohamed Hamza Tumbi of Tericsoft Technology Solutions argues for radical simplicity: an app that checks the weather and tells you exactly when to water, with small specific advice rather than overwhelming data. Harry Morton — referenced in this roundup for a wider perspective on habit-forming technology — notes that when people see a concrete trajectory rather than abstract data, they find adjustments far easier to make.
The most unusual entry comes from Carlos Correa, COO of Ringy, who argues that the biggest obstacle to solving drought isn't technology — it's manufactured outrage. Large water infrastructure projects like desalination plants and recycling mandates repeatedly get derailed by what appears to be grassroots opposition but is often bot-driven disinformation. Analysis of the Cracker Barrel boycott found nearly 45% of initial posts came from bots. His proposed app would use AI threat intelligence to distinguish real community opposition from fake, helping policymakers assess whether consensus actually exists before abandoning projects that could save millions from water scarcity.
Marta Pawlik, Co-Founder and Director of Laik, approaches the problem through the lens of design and daily habit: people don't conserve what they can't see. Her concept would visualize a household's water footprint the same way a fitness tracker visualizes steps — making conservation feel like a personal daily goal rather than a government mandate.
"Drought is a design problem as much as a resource problem. I'd create an app that visualizes your household water footprint the same way a fitness tracker visualizes steps — making conservation feel like a daily personal goal rather than a government mandate."
— Marta Pawlik, Co-Founder & Director, Laik
Shaun Bettman, CEO and Chief Mortgage Broker at Eden Emerald Mortgages, brings a property finance angle that few others in this roundup consider: water infrastructure directly affects asset value, yet most buyers have no visibility into local drought risk before signing a contract. His proposed app would score a property's water resilience the same way lenders score mortgage risk — clearly, early, and before it's too late to act.
"In property, water infrastructure directly affects asset value — yet most buyers have no visibility into local drought risk before signing a contract. I'd build an app that scores a property's water resilience the same way we score its mortgage risk: clearly, early, and before it's too late to act."
— Shaun Bettman, CEO / Chief Mortgage Broker, Eden Emerald Mortgages
Brad Jackson, Director of Operations and eCommerce Founder at After Action Cigars, draws an analogy from the premium cigar industry, where humidity control is so critical that a 2% swing in relative humidity can ruin an entire inventory batch. The obsessive real-time monitoring that protects a cigar collection, he argues, is exactly the mindset the world needs to apply to water.
"In the premium cigar business, humidity control is everything — a 2% swing in relative humidity can ruin an entire inventory batch. I'd build an app that does for water what we already do for moisture: monitor it obsessively, act on it early, and never wait until the damage is visible."
— Brad Jackson, Director of Operations, After Action Cigars
What the 30 Ideas Have in Common
Read together, these ideas point to several convergent truths. Most drought damage is preventable, not inevitable. The data needed to prevent it often already exists but sits in disconnected silos — separate sensors, separate agencies, separate apps that don't talk to each other. Behavior at the household level matters enormously, but only changes when feedback is immediate, specific, and personal rather than buried in monthly averages. And markets for water, like markets for anything, function better with better information about where supply and demand actually are.
The 30 contributors here represent one electrician, several plumbers, farmers' advocates, marketers, lawyers, a yoga entrepreneur, a mortgage broker, a cigar retailer, and a COO fighting bots. The fact that all of them have something concrete to say about drought is the clearest possible argument that solving it will require exactly this kind of cross-sector thinking — not just climate scientists and hydrologists, but anyone with a stake in how water moves through the world.
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