Future students

The University of Waterloo’s Water Institute has awarded a combined total of $72,692 to four research teams as a result of its 2017 fall term seed grant competition. The goal of this program is to catalyze interdisciplinary collaboration, facilitate interaction with international authorities, and to encourage the development of research proposals.

The program awards a total of $150,000 annually, with competitions generally held during the fall and winter terms.

On Thursday, January 18, the Water Institute welcomed members, students, and friends from across campus to tour the Institute’s new space, and to hear remarks from the executive director, Roy Brouwer. 

Cold regions are experiencing dramatic changes to regional climate and environmental conditions, bringing about more severe floods, longer drought periods and deterioration of water quality that are putting economies, communities and ecosystems at risk. Six new University of Waterloo-led research projects that are part of the Global Water Futures program, will catalyze interdisciplinary research to help tackle these environmental challenges.

In the 2017 fall term, the Department of Economics offered Waterloo’s graduate and undergraduate students a new elective course on Water Resources Economics (ECON 484/673).

Chris Parsons canoeing to a sampling site in Coot's Paradise near Toronto.

In the past two decades, the world’s ten worst floods have done more than a hundred and sixty-five billion dollars’ worth of damage and driven more than a billion people from their homes. In the summer of 2017 alone, Hurricane Harvey dumped more than fifty inches of rain over Texas, a monster monsoon season damaged more than eight hundred thousand homes in India, and flash floods and mudslides claimed at least five hundred lives in Sierra Leone.