Chair Water Quality and Sustainable Water Systems

Chair Water Quality and Sustainable Water Systems

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Welcome to the website of Water Quality and Sustainable Water Systems group at Utrecht University

The mission of our research group ‘Water Quality and Sustainable Water Systems’ is:

To contribute to an improved understanding of the state, drivers and adaptive solutions of clean water provision and water system challenges under changing climate and socio-economic developments, including the interactions with water nexus actors (particularly energy, food, domestic use and ecosystems). 

Here we focus on the main challenge of ‘how to ensure sufficient water of suitable quality for meeting human demands and healthy ecosystems in our changing world?

To address this challenge the chair contributes with:

Models & tools

Development of process-based models, tools, and data-driven water quality assessment frameworks to monitor and predict water quality hotspots and bright spots and estimate water quality trends and contributing drivers at local to global scales. 

Assessment frameworks

Design of new multi-risk water quality assessment frameworks, considering multiple pollutants, multiple sectoral risks, and multiple hazards (e.g., droughts, heatwaves, compound events).

Concepts & indicators

Development of novel concepts and indicators for quantifying water system challenges driven by both water quantity and quality issues, such as water scarcity andwater-related risks for various sectors and functions.

Quantification of complex interactions

Improved understanding and quantification of complex interactions between water systems (quality and quantity) and energy, food, and ecosystems (nexus actors) under short-term shocks (e.g., extreme weather events) and multi-decadal global change developments.

Current topics

Rivers
Water quality
Desalination
Wastewater treatment and reuse
Hydropower & thermoelectric power
Crop irrigation
Freshwater ecosystems
Drinking water
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