ERI is excited to announce the launch of The Water Futures Initiative spearheaded with funding from A. Cary Brown ’84 (Fiddlehead Fund). Water Futures is a pan-university initiative working on solutions to major socio-environmental challenges in water security. It is designed to achieve synthesis across disciplines and sectors in a problem-oriented framework. Water Futures will link faculty, students, and programs at UVA with leading scholars and professionals working in other academic and non-academic institutions, drawing from different backgrounds and perspectives. The goal of the Water Futures Initiative is to build strong, collaborative teams, centered at UVA, and primed to respond to major water resilience challenges and opportunities.
Water Futures focuses on 3 themes that address critical societal challenges: Water Security, Justice and Politics; Urban Water; and Coastal Land Margins. The initiative is based on interdisciplinary, multi-institution collaborative teams which are led by a pair of Faculty Fellows, one from a partner institution and one from UVA. Each team will have a Post-doctoral Fellow or other research staff, and student researchers. A Water Futures Research Summit in Summer 2020 will highlight transformative results from the research teams. A pan-University seminar series coinciding with the Water and Watershed Resilience Seminar in Spring 2019, will bring leading international water scholars to UVA.
