Abstract
Changes to infrastructure and its services, to natural resource management, or to the environment will Increasingly attract scrutiny from public and private actors. These interventions will be driven by economic development and uncertain future global change. In transboundary or multi-region systems, a wide range of stakeholders will try to understand how new policies and infrastructure affect them and if they will gain or lose. When changes affect multi-sector systems, the complexity and scope of negotiated outcomes increases because of the interdependencies between water, energy, food, environment (WEFE) and economies.
New approaches and tools are needed to enable broad coalitions of stakeholders to understand WEFE systems better and collaborate on management and investment decisions more effectively and efficiently. Managing multi-sector systems well requires identifying and understanding their synergies and trade-offs. This talk will describe and give examples of approaches and tools the Univ. of Manchester is developing as part of its FutureDAMS.org project ('Future Design and Assessment of water-energy-food-environment MegaSystems').
Bio
Professor Julien Harou is Chair in Water Engineering since 2013. Previously he was a lecturer at University College London. He has a PhD from the University of California Davis in water resources engineering and economics and an Master’s degree from Cornell University. His BSc was in geology and he completed complementary degrees in philosophy and religious science. Julien's group contributes globally leading applied research in water resources planning and management, water-energy-food systems, and environmental management software. His serves as research director of FutureDAMS.org which created the WaterStrategy.org and Nexus-Strategy.org design portals.
