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Water Security Past News & Events

Thursday 4th October 2012 @ 1:00pm

Room 102 Chadwick Building

Dr. Ralph Hall, Virginia Tech (USA)

"A Perspective on Multiple-Use Water Services and Rural Water Supply Sustainability"

The productive use of domestic water holds great promise to improve the financial and technical sustainability of rural water supply systems and reduce poverty. Yet, empirical research on this subject is limited. This talk will present the results from a large-scale study undertaken in rural Senegal and Kenya to assess the link between the productive use of domestic water, poverty reduction, and sustainability. The talk will also discuss an incremental-cost analysis that assessed whether the theoretical financial benefits to households from additional piped-water-based productive activities would be greater than the estimated system upgrade costs. The policy implications from the findings of the study will be discussed.

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Thursday 4th October 2012 @ 5:30pm

Room G07 Pearson Building

Professor Dave Sabatini, University of Oklahoma (USA)

"Arsenic & Fluoride Mitigation Approaches in Developing Countries: Novel Adsorbents in Pursuit of Sustainable Solutions"

This seminar will discuss the development of novel water treatment technologies for arsenic and fluoride mitigation in remote villages of developing countries.  Nearly 1 billion people lack access to an improved water source, and water quality concerns affect an even greater number of people.  Next to pathogens arsenic and fluoride are major water quality issues, affecting an estimated 200 million people globally.  With 2 billion people living on less than $2US per day, novel and inexpensive water treatment technologies are important to the pursuit of sustainable solutions.  Our research looks at using local materials and locally available technology to produce low cost and sustainable adsorbents to remove arsenic and fluoride. Two types of adsorbents will be discussed – iron oxide amended wood chars for arsenic removal, with a focus on Cambodia, and activated bone char / aluminum oxide amended wood and bone chars for fluoride removal, with a focus on Ethiopia.  These materials are shown to have surface properties and specific surface areas that make them competitive with proprietary and more expensive media used in developed countries while having the advantage of being made using local materials and local technologies (e.g., kilns used for firing clay pots).  Beyond the technical elements we are also considering behavioral change and business/entrepreneurship aspects of developing sustainable solution to these issues and helping bring these approaches to scale in cooperation with faculty colleagues from business and anthropology/sociology.


Tuesday 16th October 2012
Richard Taylor, Department of Geography
Groundwater and climate change - an inter-disciplinary review

Tuesday 30th October 2012
Megan French, Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR)
Water risk and its management on the Bolivian Altiplano

Tuesday 13th November 2012
John MacArthur, Department of Earth Sciences
Beyond arsenic in groundwater

Tuesday 5th March 2012
Mohammad Shamsudduha, Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR)
The security of deep groundwater abstraction in SE Bangladesh

Tuesday 19th March 2012
Mohammad Hoque, Department of Earth Sciences
Palaeo-interfluvial Aquifers of the Bengal basin