News

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 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.

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

Professor Mark Servos, Canada Research Chair in Water Quality Protection and professor of Biology, Nandita Basu, professor in the Departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering, and post-doctoral fellow, Kim Van Meter, were prominently featured in Kitchener-Waterloo’s local newspaper.

Today, 4.5 billion people live without a household toilet that safely disposes of their waste. World Toilet Day, which took place on Sunday, November 19, is about inspiring action to tackle the global sanitation crisis.

The University of Waterloo has entered into a partnership with the University of Alberta and Insituform Technologies to improve the maintenance of water distribution pipelines.

The partnership is part of the Alberta-Ontario Innovation Program(AOP)-NSERC program.

Water samples taken from Lake Superior show that the Thunder Bay area appears to have a significant amount of plastic pollutants.

The samples were collected in 2014 as part of a fish survey on Lake Superior by an American research team.

The presence and accumulation of plastic debris in the marine environment has seen a substantial increase, with global production of plastics having grown exponentially in the last 60 years, from 1.5 million tons of plastics around 1950 to more than 300 million tons annually in 2014. In 2010 alone, estimates show that between 4.8 and 12.7 million tons of plastic litter entered the marine environment (UNEP and GRID-Arendal, 2016. Marine Litter Vital Graphics. United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi, Kenya).