Water infrastructure in resource-constrained shrinking and expanding cities: The impact on water quality and public health

As part of the Water Institute's WaterTalks lecture series, Dr. Nancy G. Love, JoAnn Silverstein Distinguished University Professor, Borchardt and Glysson Collegiate Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, will present: Water infrastructure in resource-constrained shrinking and expanding cities: The impact on water quality and public health.

This event is in person in DC 1302 with a networking lunch reception to follow in DC 1301 (The Fishbowl).

More information

Across the world, in both the Global North and Global South, rapid shifts are occurring where people reside.  Today, approximately 15% of the U.S. population, or 48 million people, live in what are called “shrinking cities” while the majority of the world’s population growth is occurring in the expanding cities of the Global South.  In both these cases, the population shift has a direct impact on the performance of urban water infrastructure and create situations where extended water storage is the norm.  This can impose risks upon public health due, in part, to reduced microbial stability in distributed drinking water and enhanced microbial regrowth of opportunistic pathogens that pose a risk for selected sectors of the population.  In both cases, residents often migrate toward point-of-use water management strategies, which may solve some public health challenges and introduce others.  In this talk, I will lay out the challenges in these urban cases, discuss case studies from field campaigns in Michigan (USA) and Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) that demonstrate these challenges, and offer discussion points for future opportunities.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Nancy G. Love is the JoAnn Silverstein Distinguished University Professor and the Borchardt and Glysson Collegiate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University Michigan. In collaboration with her students, Dr. Love works at the interface of water, infrastructure, environmental quality, and public health in both domestic and global settings. The group is focused on understanding how engineering design and operation of water systems influence sustainability and equitable access to healthy water services and advancing methods to achieve a circular nutrient economy.  Their core work centers on identifying and translating fundamental understanding into practical solutions for water utilities and communities. She has co-authored about 140 peer-reviewed papers and around 350 book chapters, major reports, editorials, conference abstracts and papers, and a textbook on biological wastewater treatment. Dr. Love has held leadership positions in multiple organizations, including the Water Environment Federation (WEF), the International Water Association (IWA), and the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP), and is a Fellow of all three. She is a licensed professional engineer (P.E.) in the State of Michigan and a Board Certified Environmental Engineer (BCEE).