Oggi pomeriggio alle 14.30 in Aula Castigliano (ed. 5, Politecnico di Milano) si terrà un seminario intitolato Current needs, challenges and opportunities in water quality monitoring, modelling and management tenuto dal Prof. Loucks (Cornell University). Maggiori informazioni QUI.

Abstract: This talk will offer some thoughts regarding the current needs, challenges and opportunities in water quality monitoring, modelling and management. Many needs are highlighted by major pollution events that continue to persist and have not yet been successfully managed. Opportunities mostly focus on improving model applicability or ease of implementation. Challenges seem in most cases to be related to insufficient data for model calibration and validation. This in turn reflects on the challenges of maintaining long term monitoring and knowing what to monitor even before such data are deemed needed. Data useful for developing and validating large scale water quality models are often only sparsely available if at all. This applies in particular for emerging pollutants (e.g. plastics, chemicals, drugs), and especially in most developing countries. Monitoring and modelling water quality at the global scale is important to identify and predict robust hot spot regions of severe water quality degradation, to better understand future (global) changes in response to management actions, and to quantify indicators and linkages among SDGs. For many pollutants, and especially at large scales, water quality modelling is still in its infancy. These are needed to enable meaningful water quality assessments and inform policies needed for water quality management and decision making.

Short Bio: Daniel P. Loucks is  Emeritus Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Professor at the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. He has been actively involved in both the development and application of economics, ecology and systems analysis methods to the solution of environmental and regional water resources problems for over four decades. Prof. Loucks has been a Research Fellow at Harvard University; an Economist at the Development Research Center of the World Bank; a Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis; and a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Colorado in Boulder, the University of Adelaide in South Australia, the Aachen University of Technology in Germany, the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, the University of Texas in Austin, and the Technical University of Vienna, Austria. As a consultant to private, governmental and international organizations including the United Nations, the World Bank, and NATO, he has participated in regional water resources planning, development and management projects in Africa, Asia, Australia, Eastern and Western Europe, and North and South America.