WaterTalk: Droughts in a human-dominated world: Feedbacks, legacies and inequalities

Thursday, February 16, 2023 10:00 am - 11:00 am EST (GMT -05:00)

WaterTalks

As part of the Water Institute's WaterTalks lecture seriesDr. Giuliano Di BaldassarreProfessor, Department of Earth Sciences & Principal Investigator HydroSocialExtremes, Uppsala University, Sweden will present: Droughts in a human-dominated world: Feedbacks, legacies and inequalities.

This event will be offered online (Zoom).

More information

Societies have increasingly influenced the frequency and severity of hydrological drought over the past centuries by: i) building dams and reservoirs to secure water supply; ii) diverting water flows to supply cities, industries and agriculture; and iii) changing river basin characteristics through deforestation, urbanization and drainage of wetlands. While societies influence hydrological droughts, drought occurrences (and risks) influence societies. Adaptive responses include migration from drought-affected areas or changes in water allocation and governance. In this talk, I present case studies, global analyses and models to show how these sociohydrological feedbacks can generate legacy risks or social inequalities and thus challenge the development of sustainable policies of disaster risk reduction and water management.

Speaker bio

Giuliano
Giuliano Di Baldassarre is a professor of surface water hydrology and environmental analysis at the Department of Earth Sciences of Uppsala University, Sweden. He is also the Director of the Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science (CNDS), which currently supports about 30 early career scientists (PhD candidates and postdocs in social, engineering and earth science) in three Swedish universities (www.cnds.se). Giuliano aims to understand how (and why) the interplay between social, technical and physical processes can generate risks, crises or disasters. His research focuses on natural hazards, including droughts and floods. In this context, he has led an interdisciplinary research group as the PI of the project HydroSocialExtremes (www.hydrosocialextremes.org) funded by the European Research Council (ERC, Consolidator Grant). Giuliano has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the Plinius Medal by the European Geosciences Union (EGU), Thuréus Prize by the Royal Society of Sciences (Uppsala), and the Witherspoon Lecture Award by the American Geophysical Union (AGU). He has been one of the leaders of of Panta Rhei–Everything Flows in since 2013 (and the Chair in biennium 2017-2019), the global research initiative of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) bringing together hundreds of scientists worldwide doing research on water and society. He has more than 150 publications, including several papers in multidisciplinary journals, such as Nature SustainabilityScience Advances and Nature.


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