Water for All: Global Solutions for a Changing Climate

As the cumulative effects of population pressure, increasing wealth and a changing climate intersect with water policies and investments that fail to consider impacts on human health and the natural environment, the world will experience more severe water crises in the coming decades. To provide transformative solutions that are likely to be adopted, research and development is needed that employs the latest technologies, embraces systems-level thinking and considers the way in which new technologies diffuse into practice. The recent movement towards closed-loop municipal water systems being pioneered in water stressed places like Southern California and Singapore provide an example of the ways in which research and development can support new solutions to coping with water scarcity. In the future, the focus of research and development in urban systems is likely to shift from centralized treatment to premise-scale water recycling systems that offer new opportunities to optimize water use, energy efficiency and resource recovery. Opportunities also will arise from decreases in the costs of established desalination technologies, like reverse osmosis. In this area, innovation is needed to manage the brine produced by desalination and to develop more flexible separation methods. If researchers can identify cost-effective approaches for handling desalination brines or minimizing their production, crises related to water scarcity, soil salinization and the degradation of ecosystems could be prevented. The successful development and deployment of such approaches will require collaborations among scientists, engineers and policy experts to connect fundamental research with actions that will alter the way that the world obtains, treats and uses water.

Speaker: David Sedlak, UC Berkeley