News

Canadian homeowners do not have the information they need to know if they should buy flood insurance leaving them exposed to significant financial risk. 

A recent study from the University of Waterloo found flood mapping information in Canada was inadequate, incomplete, hard to locate and varied widely from province-to-province.

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has announced funding for a Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation project under their Climate Change Adaptation Program. Water Institute member and professor Derek Robinson, from the Waterloo's Department of Geography and Environmental Management, is a co-applicant on the grant.

The Partners for Action (P4A) network at The University of Waterloo, Faculty of Environment, co-led by Water Institute member Jason Thistlethwaite, has received renewed funding from The Co-operators Group Ltd. The $600,000 will support P4A's efforts to facilitate increased risk awareness, enhance cross-sector coll

Three University of Waterloo Engineering students from the Conrad Master of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology program embarked on a mission in 2018, to help provide safe drinking water to those who need it most.

Food security is an urgent and growing concern for Indigenous populations in Canada. Environmental change in aquatic ecosystems can impact the health of fish and the communities that rely on those fish in many ways. Some of those ways can involve exposure to contaminants like mercury.

Jason Deglint, Systems Design Engineering PhD candidate and winner of the 2017 AquaHacking competition, is building new technology to leverage the power of artificial intelligence for safe, clean water. Along with founding members Chao Jin and Alexander Wong, the vision of their company – Blue Lion Labs – is to allow treatment plants, governments, private organizations, and local communities, to be proactive in

Mitchell Kay,Biology PhD candidate and graduate of Waterloo's Collaborative Water Program, is creating a baseline to measure natural variation caused by development in northern Alberta.

Andrea Minano, Geography PhD candidate, is the coordinator of the Canadian Coastal Resilience Forum (CCRF) led by Water Institute member Jason Thistlethwaite. She is responsible for organizing and facilitating CCRF activities and engagement. Andrea also manages the Flood Policy Research Group — an interdisciplinary group of researchers focusing on Canadian flood policy and flood risk management.

Every year a significant amount of runoff water, contaminated with hydrocarbons, gets washed into stormwater drains and released into the water bodies, often untreated. This problem is often overlooked while contaminants accumulate and negatively impact the environment – including the water quality and animal and plant habitats.

Warmer winters are leading to a greater frequency of freeze-thaw events and colder soils due to the loss of the insulating snowpack. These factors are subsequently changing the movement of water, carbon and nutrients in soils during the winter. Many assume that frozen soils are dormant. However, a new research project at the University of Waterloo is discovering that soils remain biogeochemically active during winter months, just differently from other seasons.