Your team takes the controls of the Kingdom's water system in a live two-day simulation. Not as an awareness exercise, as an economic one: every drop has a price, every fix has a cost, and your job is to build the smartest portfolio of moves for 2040. You leave with that portfolio, plus a published Field Note in the GBOX Futures Observatory.
A tactile snapshot of participant calculations, tradeoffs, and policy moves actively negotiated during the two-day sprint:
Watch the simulation prologue: exploring the Kingdom's deep fossil aquifers, energy-intensive desalination networks, and the 2040 portfolio equation.
The essential systemic realities that anchor every calculation and scenario in the 2040 simulation:
It took thousands of years to collect. Every drop pumped is gone for good.
A real Saudi achievement, but it costs enormous energy and leaves behind brine, the concentrated salty water after the fresh is removed.
Farms take most of every drop, much of it pumped from those ancient reserves. Which means soil that holds moisture, and land pulled back from degradation, is water strategy too.
The UN Water Conference lands here in 2027. The Kingdom will be expected to lead it, not just host it.
A structured two-day simulation taking participants from whole-system mapping to portfolio defense:
The room builds one honest map of where the Kingdom's water comes from, who uses it, and what it costs.
We age that picture fourteen years and watch where the system strains first.
Every team runs the full system together through three rounds: deciding who gets the ancient groundwater, with farms as the biggest claimant, and whether restored soil that holds moisture can shrink what the land needs to pump; operating a solar-powered desalination plant after the sun sets; and testing whether brine can become a mineral industry instead of a waste problem. Students consistently produce the bravest thinking in that last round.
This is where the lab differs from every water workshop you have seen. Teams do not write wish lists. They allocate: limited money, limited energy, limited water, spread across desalination, groundwater, brine recovery, and land restoration, sequenced over fourteen years. Every choice priced, every trade-off owned. Portfolios are presented in a closing panel run like an investment committee, with leadership asking real questions.
After every lab, GBOX publishes a Field Note: a sharp, credited record of what your room discovered. It enters the GBOX Futures Observatory, our growing body of foresight intelligence across the region.
Teachers cite it, students link it, leadership points to it. Two days in the room, a permanent place in the record.
Explore Published Field Notes →
A cross-cutting simulation delivering distinct strategic value to every cohort in the room:
Leaders get a priced, sequenced 2040 portfolio and a public artifact, not a workshop certificate.
Teachers get a classroom-ready version of the simulation and the confidence to run it, mapped to curriculum outcomes.
Students get two days operating the Kingdom's water system and contributor credit on a published Field Note, before university applications open.
Two consecutive days, on site or at a partner venue. Fifteen to thirty participants, mixed seniority by design. English, Arabic, or bilingual. Fully facilitated, all materials included, Field Note published after.
