Current students

Renison University College will be hosting the annual, international Trinity Institute Conference on March 22-24, 2017. This year's livestream from New York City will focus on Water Justice.

Trinity Institute is a global conference held in New York City and webcast all over the world. With a sharp focus on the need for water justice initiatives in areas of access, droughts, pollution, rising tides, and flooding, Trinity Institute aims to offer actionable guidance surrounding these issues.

Four researchers from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences are the co-recipients of a $672,000 USD grant from the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) to study the fate of groundwater pollutants in arid regions.

The Waterloo team, all members of the Water Institute, are part of a consortium including researchers from Qatar University, United Arab Emirates University, Utrecht University, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, and Université Libre de Bruxelles.

water institute members in the media
CBC News recently featured a story on the rising cost of providing clean drinking water to Fort McMurray after the 2016 wildfire. The city's water treatment plant is spending more on food-grade chemicals to remove burnt forest-floor ash that's flushing into the municipality's drinking water supply.

Water Institute member Monica Emelko has been working with the province and the municipality since day one to monitor the wildfire's impact on the Athabasca River.

The story includes an interview by Emelko an, Associate Professor in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and her team. 

Join us for a facilitated panel discussion on coastal watersheds in the Anthropocene. Supported by the OceanCanada Partnership and the Water Institute, this public event is being organized as part of a two-day workshop with the goal to develop and apply a social-ecological system perspective to broaden our understanding of abrupt and rapid changes in coastal watersheds. 

Wednesday, March 22, 2017 (all day)

World Water Day 2017

world water day logo
The eighth annual UN World Water Day in Waterloo is on March 22, 2017. This year's theme is wastewater, and the campaign ‘Why waste water?’ is about reducing and reusing wastewater. 

Co-hosted by the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University, this event is a celebration of water which showcases water research at both universities. This year it will be hosted at Wilfrid Laurier. 

Monday, June 19, 2017 8:00 am - Friday, June 23, 2017 5:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Principles of Hydrologic Modelling: Professional short course and graduate course (CIVE 781)

This course, hosted at the University of Waterloo and co-sponsored by the Canadian Society for Hydrological Sciences and the Canadian Water Resources Association, addresses the development of computational models of watershed hydrology in support of water resources management and scientific investigation.

Wednesday, April 12, 2017 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Water: Abundance, scarcity, and security in the age of humanity

Jeremy SchmidtAs part of the Water Institute's WaterTalks lecture series, Jeremy Schmidt, lecturer of Human Geography at Durham University, United Kingdom, presents "Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity."

Register today.

Dmitri Kavetski
Environmental scientists and engineers often require calibrating and testing their models against observed data. Despite major research efforts by the hydrological community, both topics present formidable challenges, both in operational and research settings.

Register today.