Rivers have played a crucial role in many of mankind’s greatest milestones. Some of the earliest remains of hominid species were discovered around the Awash River in Ethiopia. Evidence of nomadic hunting to agriculture can be traced along rivers in the Near East. The first civilizations (approximately 3000 BC) were built around rivers Euphrates, Tigris, Nile and Indus, and a little later along the Yellow River. In addition to providing food and water for survival, rivers have also held a very spiritual meaning. Many cultures around the world have paralleled rivers to mothers and some cultures even believe that rivers have the power to cleanse humanity of its sins (McCully, 2001). We have used this abundance of water to make strides in human development however, we took our water for granted and now the state of rivers around the world is in turmoil.
​
A study titled, “Global threats to human water security and river biodiversity” published in Nature in 2010, states that nearly 80% of the world’s population is exposed to high levels of threat to water security. The study focused on rivers and concluded that drivers such as catchment disturbance, pollution, water resource development and biotic factors are the causes to such threats. The figure below shows the global incident threat to human water security quantified by using a global geospatial framework and merging individual stressors.

​Human water security is only one half of the picture because freshwater species are also in critical condition. The 2014 WWF Living Planet Report has established a living planet index (LPI) that reflects changes in the state of the planet’s biodiversity by using trends in population sizes of vertebrate species to calculate average changes of abundance over time. The figure below shows that the freshwater LPI from 1970 to 2010 (1970 LPI = 1) has declined by 76%.

​There is an alarming cause for concern for humans and wildlife due to the state of rivers worldwide. I now want to shift your attention to Canada. As a mostly uninhabited land mass, Canada has not yet done nearly as much damage to our rivers as some parts of the world shown in Figure 1. But Canadian rivers are not immune to the potential threats that have taken hold on the rest of the planet. A report titled, “Canada’s rivers at risk” by WWF published in 2011 outlined the three main challenges to Canada’s rivers:

• Flow regulation and fragmentation – Thousands of dams have disturbed natural flow paths and stored water that would naturally flow downstream freely.
• Withdrawals and diversion – Moving water between watersheds artificially causes changes in river flow, which can have many negative consequences.
• Climate change – Maximum flow rates are generally decreasing in rivers, while spring runoff is occurring earlier. Climate change can also alter intensity, duration and frequency of flooding.

Although these challenges exist, Canada still has a course of action to avoid a freshwater crisis. The previously mentioned WWF report proposes that Canada should become a world leader in taking aggressive action on climate change, regulate river withdrawals to sustainable limits and seize the opportunities to implement sustainable technologies for hydropower and other instream infrastructure. To summarize, I will simply quote the WWF report:

The challenge for Canada, as one of the world’s water-wealthy nations, is to protect and restore the nation’s rivers while playing a leading role in feeding and fuelling an increasingly thirsty and warming world.

​As a Master’s student studying civil engineering, I’m taking the opportunity to make a difference in how Canadians value our rivers. Our team of interdisciplinary researchers at Queen’s University is investigating the potential impacts of oil spills to fish habitats in Canadian rivers. This study will help outline the environmental and economic benefits/drawbacks of the thousands of kilometers of proposed oil pipelines that will cross numerous waterways with the potential to spill oil directly into the freshwater and freshwater sediments. We are developing a framework that will help future industry and government agencies make responsible choices when it comes to our rivers in order to prevent Canada from becoming the next red-shaded area in Figure 1.

References
1) McCully, Patrick. "Silenced Rivers: the Ecololgy and Politics of Large Dams." (1998).
2) Vörösmarty, Charles J., et al. "Global threats to human water security and river biodiversity." 
    Nature 467.7315 (2010): 555-561.
3) WWF. “Living planet: Report 2014.” WWF, 2014.
4) WWF. “Canada’s Rivers at Risk.” WWF, 2011.

Avneet Button is in the second year of his Master's in Civil Engineering at Queen's University. In addition to his research, Avneet enjoys serving as the ​Industry Finance Manager for WatIF 2016. After completion of his Master's, Avneet aims to tackle large scale water resource engineering projects in efficient, environmentally sustainable and cost effective methods.

Author Contact: 
14ab28[at]queensu[dot]ca

While I stand as the lone foreigner staring down into a well that appears broken, a man about my age looks on and chuckles. “Go ahead and fix it,” he says, “then go back to your country just like all the others.” I am somehow offended, yet only bothered because I know that what he says is true. “Don’t worry if it breaks,” he taunts playfully, “someone else will come after you to build a new one.”
 
FAILURE. FAILURE! FAIIILLLURE!!!! Okay, I just had to get that out of the way…
Working in the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector, failure is a reality that must be faced. In all areas of life, understanding and learning from failure is integral to achieving the equally memorable moments of success. Yet where are all the publications talking about failure? Why does every NGO seem to be single-handedly revolutionizing the historically problematic development field, taking a new approach that actually works?!
 
In academia and in the workplace we are compelled to highlight our successes in order to build-up our reputations and to encourage others to put faith in us. Feeling successful inspires us to be more ambitious, more open to reaching out to others and more motivated to continue with our work. While it is classic wisdom to learn from our mistakes, in the development sector (and others) this is easier said than done. Most projects rely on soliciting funding from donors who must have confidence that their contributions will lead to discernable change. In academia we often rely on external funding that is awarded to those who
​demonstrate evidence of past successes with the assumption that these individuals and groups are the most likely to succeed again in the future.  We avoid taking risks because we are afraid to fail.

While it is fair to celebrate success, the ‘fail forward’ movement is gaining momentum as people come to accept the notion that “the only ‘bad’ failure is one that’s repeated” (admittingfailure.com). If we keep quiet about our failures, not only do we miss the chance to study and learn from them ourselves, but also we miss the opportunity to learn from others’. As a somewhat unabashed person myself, I find that most times I publicly share a story of failure it seems to foster an unassuming space where others then feel comfortable sharing their mistakes and challenges. Too often I find that more than one of us has had similar experiences that could have been avoided with proper communication about them from the beginning. As Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.”

The Sustainability enigma
One challenge in the water and WASH sectors is this word sustainability. While the concept is written into thousands of legal statutes, masters’ theses, and Twitter feeds worldwide, there is not one single consensus definition. It insinuates that something can be maintained or upheld for a certain period of time, yet I ask who is it that determines how long something must be ‘sustained’ in order to be truly ‘sustainable’? In the context of sustainable development, the word implies three pillars of longevity: environmental, social, and economical (sometimes a forth– cultural vitality). Yet how can we complete a two-year project and claim it is going to be sustainable? In the WASH arena, it seems that it is not uncommon to see a project mention a brief follow-up study or site-visit tacked onto the end of an implementation project as a means to ‘tick the sustainability box’. So does this mean that if a project appears to be functioning on the day that the inspector goes to look at it somewhere between six-months and two years after completion, that the project is a sustainability success? What about in the rainy season? What about five years after? Or fifty? Let’s call a spade a spade and recognize that it’s impossible to claim a project is sustainable when we are operating at most on a five-year project funding timeline and usually from across the globe.

​A recent survey by Improve International asked 40 US-based WASH NGOs about their contracts with their financial donors with the aim of identifying some reasons for the WASH sectors high failure rates (link follows article).  They found that 74% of donors request that project is measured in terms of ‘number of water points, toilets, or number of direct beneficiaries’, meanwhile 63% of donors do not provide funding for long-term post-project monitoring. What does that suggest?  WASH implementers are essentially encouraged to build as many toilets as possible in developing nations with no system in place or liability set for long-term monitoring of the new infrastructure. Then we ask ourselves “Why do people still lack long-lasting access to drinking water and sanitation facilities?”
 
Common answers point to internal problems in the aid-receiving country (corruption, instability, resistance to change) yet rarely do we consider the implications of rapid rate project-cycling and the restrictions imposed by donors (Moriarity, 2015). As radical as it sounds, it appears that FAILURE might have something to do with OUR APPROACH. Short-funding cycles trap even the best-intentioned individuals and organizations into repeating the same failures over and over again. No brilliantly designed toilet alone can overcome the systemic problem of get-in-get-out WASH projects. As Improve International says, ‘Let’s measure success not by dollars spent on projects but on how many people have water and sanitation services over time.’ 

​I can tell you from first-hand experience that it is not uncommon in rural Africa to see one or two abandoned wells for every one well that is functioning (if one is functioning). I know of a town that has an entire network of water distribution pipes in the ground that are not connected to any water source and not even the elders in the town have an idea as to who put them there. Each well cost thousands of dollars and was drilled by a donor-based organization that arrived on the scene with a prerogative to build X number of wells to provide drinking water to Y number of people—then left. Perhaps no local engineer or mechanic was involved in the construction and therefore had no idea how to troubleshoot the problems that inevitably came up. Perhaps the hardware that was used is not locally available and spare parts were impossible to come by. Perhaps no local group was given ownership of the well so the local community was not able to decide on who should pay to repair it and it was allowed to deteriorate over time. As an engineer I understand the concept of design life, but these projects fail not because of age but because of shortcomings on the ‘soft’ aspects of design.
​

We are so quick to install as many wells as possible that we do not take the time to connect with the community, to ask their needs and to invite them to take ownership of the project to ensure that it is preserved for a lifetime. We do not invest in training or financial empowerment initiatives that might help communities to be prepared to solve their own needs in the future. Why give a man a fish when you can instead teach him how to catch his own? In a short funding cycle it is easier to demonstrate how many fish he has eaten since you showed up than it is to express that he’s still learning to be a better fisherman and continues to go hungry some nights in the process.  
 
While I have no doubt that infrastructure-donation organizations are well intentioned, I do wonder why each of us thinks that we are going to be able to do it so much better than the one who came before us. What do we expect to happen if world charity ceases to continue, or do we not want to plan for that day?

​Nothing Good Comes Easily--Coming back to Failure
We are in that failure trap. We are ashamed of mistakes, we hide them (or shroud them in excuses that are outside of our control), and we repeat them. We embrace risk-aversion techniques and get stuck in status quo solutions that make it easy to ‘succeed.’ Money spent – check. Progress measured (in number of taps and people served)—check. Start applying for the next grant—check. 

WatIF we were not afraid to fail? Would we engage in the underexplored and uncertain process of initiating transformative shifts in the way that the system functions? WatIF we worked to educate a generation so that they demand WASH facilities from their governments and societies, instead of coming in from the outside and insisting that people need what we want to give? WatIF we took the risk to promote business-skills training for aspiring water engineers, knowing that some will not go onto to serve their communities but that others might go on to do extraordinary things?  WatIF we dared to make aid-assisted WASH development obsolete, by risking to improving billions of lives in a slow and messy way instead of settling on improving thousands of lives in a way that is quick and temporary?
 
When we are driven by purpose—not competition—we can embrace inter-personal and inter-organizational learning to better advancing our shared goals. When we stop treating failure as the elephant in the room we can foster innovation to discover paths to the systemic changes needed to overcome the statues quo. WatIF?

Sources of Inspiration and Information:  
1. Engineers Without Borders. (2016). Admitting Failure. Retrieved February 01, 2016, from https://www.admittingfailure.org/
2. Improve International. (2015, December 12). Do donor restrictions affect sustainability of water and sanitation interventions? Results from a Pilot Survey. Retrieved from https://improveinternational.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/pilot-study-donor-restrictions-wash-sustainability-12-21-15.pdf
3. Moriarity, P. (2015, October 15). Paying the Piper- 3 Things Donors Can Do To Drive Real Change. Retrieved February 6, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-moriarty/paying-the-piper-3-things-donors-can-do-to-drive-real-change_b_8303668.html 

Angela Huston is a PhD Candidate in Civil Engineering at McGill University. Her interdisciplinary research mixes participatory social science methods with traditional engineering tools to develop a holistic understanding of water, sanitation, and hygiene issues in Buea, Cameroon. She has worked with Engineers Without Borders Canada’s Global Engineering Initiative and Waterlution’s Transformative Leaders for the Future Program.
​Twitter: AngelaMHuston

I had the privilege of being a part of the planning team for the first WatIF conference in 2014. There was a great excitement in being a part of a team that was defining what WatIF would be for participating graduate students. At the time of the conference, I was in the third year of my undergraduate degree at Queen’s University. Similar to many students in their senior years, I was unclear as to what my next steps would be. I knew that I was interested in water and other environmental issues and so I decided to volunteer for WatIF. However, what I wasn’t expecting was that WatIF provided me with the inspiration and confidence I needed to pursue graduate studies and empowered me to apply for positions that I would have never considered would be achievable.
 
Working with my fellow committee members and participating in the conference gave me the self-assurance I needed to lead in a room full of intellectuals and understand my interests and motivations on a deeper level. I was pushed outside of my comfort zone, and was thus able to realize that there are so many opportunities for growth in water related endeavours that don’t necessarily follow the normal trajectory that undergraduate/graduate students follow. So I decided to apply for an internship at the United Nations, and set my sights on cities in Europe and Asia with regional or specialized offices. I applied for very general positions that specified work on ‘sustainable development’ and the ‘environment’. I eventually was offered the position at the United Nations ESCAP in Bangkok, Thailand where I helped research for a regional entry for the World Water Development Report 2016, which focused on the intersections of impact investment in improved water and sanitation and job creation in the Asia-Pacific region. Once I developed a strong relationship with my supervisor, she told me that my involvement with WatIF was a contributing factor that helped me secure the internship. I believe as researchers, we sometimes hit roadblocks and doubt ourselves, however, experiences such as this assured me that I was taking the necessary steps to achieve my overall goals.

​Volunteering to help organize WatIF 2014 was the training I needed to learn how to engage and network with my peers, professors, and industry leaders, a skill that students in academia rarely have a chance to develop outside of their own fields. The Co-Chairs of the conference did not shy away from entrusting me with responsibilities and making me feel a part of the success of the event, which gave me a sense of confidence in my own personal abilities. Although the conference was extremely impactful, my favourite aspect about my overall involvement stemmed from the meaningful relationships I formed with other students and participants. These connections are ones that I believe I will have throughout my career and friendships I will cherish for the rest of my life. When I was applying for my internship at the United Nations and completing my graduate studies applications, I felt as though I had mentors with me through every step. The lessons I took away from the entire experience made me feel more prepared for graduate school and future endeavours I partake in.
 
Participating in WatIF will make you a stronger leader because the conference is designed to build your skill sets and your confidence. It is an entirely student organized and operated event and so you really feel like a community of early leaders. This conference encouraged collaboration and partnership among students, industry leaders, and university faculty. More than other similar events I have attended, WatIF promotes unity amongst researchers through stressing the interdisciplinary nature of managing such a vital resource. We all spend a great deal of time in our offices and laboratories working on topics that deal with water, and platforms such as WatIF allow us to take a step back from our research and make the connections we need to implement our life’s work and empower us to take a leap forward and do things we would have never thought possible.

Every year, the feast-day of Saint Marcellus is celebrated in January; however, in the year 1362 there was no time for celebrating. For weeks, storms had been raging in the countries along the North Sea where the coastal communities feared for the worst and on the morning of the 16th of January, the day the festivities usually began, the weather was exceptionally bad. After a night of raging winds and heavy rainfall, the seawater level along the North Sea coast had risen by almost 2.5 meters. That day, high tides combined with the disastrous storm caused a storm surge that resulted in the flooding of vast areas of the Low Countries. An estimated 40,000 people perished and the events of that day are remembered as the Saint Marcellus Flood, or “de Eerste Grote Mandrenke”: the first great drowning of man.

In the late fourteenth-century storm surges and floods like the one in 1362 continuously battered the Low Countries. Due to the regional political turbulence  known as the Hook and Cod wars (de Hoekse en Kabeljauwse twisten) the maintenance of dikes had been neglected, resulting in ever increasing damage and casualty among the coastal towns and communities. In 1404, the abbot of Ter Duin (in modern-day Belgium) writes about the disastrous flood on Saint Elisabeth’s day that it “(…) swept away houses, while animals and men drowned without mercy. The swollen sea swept over its banks in a way no-one has ever seen before”.

Curiously, on this same feast-day of Saint Elisabeth in 1421 and 1424 two more disastrous floods occurred. During the Second Saint Elisabeth Flood of 1421, a total of 23 villages were swept away and around two-thousand people perished in the resulting chaos. This flood is famously depicted on the right panel of an altarpiece dedicated to Saint Elisabeth which is currently on display in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. On the right of the painting the water can be seen breaking through the dikes and engulfing the towns and villages.

​​Nowadays, the bad weather in late mediaeval Northwestern Europe is usually explained by climatologists as the “little ice age”: the colder period after the Medieval Climatic Optimum. For hundreds of years, people in the Low Countries had been managing the water level in the peaty marshlands where they lived using primitive drainage systems. By digging channels parallel to each other in peat bogs or fens, the water would collect in these channels and the land in between the channels would become dry. Using a flap gate, a structure that is still used today, people were able to subsequently let the water flow out of the channels. In fact, the oldest flap gate discovered in the world was excavated in Vlaardingen, near Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and is dated to c. 70 - 120 AD. This system worked very well, but there was one big drawback. Peatland is 10% organic material and 90% water, thus by removing the water artificially, and lowering the groundwater level using these drainage channels, the peatlands started to subside. Apart from keeping everyone’s feet dry, dried peat, known as turf, was very widely used as fuel during this time. In a virtually treeless peatland, turf was the only fuel available. The practice known as peat cutting became more and more common and this resulted in huge peatlands virtually disappearing. Or - quite literally - going up in smoke. The extent of the problem becomes clear when looking at the palaeogeographic maps of the Netherlands.

​Almost 1400 years of drainage and peat cutting had left the landscape around 1500 AD looking like  swiss cheese (or a dutch cheese, if you will). Storm surges and floods had taken their toll on the ever-subsiding landscape and what previously was peatland had now transformed into an area with huge lakes. Naturally draining the water and keeping villages and communities dry had become more and more difficult, and people  started to develop methods of manual drainage. Devices such as scoop wheels driven by people or cattle were used, but it was all to no avail. The land continued to subside, and thus something had to be done to save the drowning Low Countries.

​And then suddenly,  in 1405, spectacular news arrived from the north of Holland. Two carpenters, Jan Grietenzoon and Floris van Alkemade had constructed a windmill that could “throw out” water. With this news, the members of the national water-management board (“Hoogheemraadschap”) could breathe a sigh of relief. As they prepare to make the journey north to witness “the miracle near the town of Alkmaar” with their own eyes, they wonder if this mysterious invention can save the flood-plagued country…
This event marks a major change in Dutch windmill technology. Since their appearance in the Low Countries in 1198, windmills were only used to grind cereals and no one had ever attempted to redesign them for another purpose. Thankfully, Jan Grietenzoon and Floris van Alkemade had thought to mount a scoop wheel to the sails of an existing flour mill and successfully made it pump water. The invention quickly spread, and waterpumping windmills (also called windpumps sometimes) were built everywhere. Suddenly, these large bodies of water that now filled up most of the map of Holland began to look less and less daunting. In 1533, the penny finally dropped. Two illustrious figures, Jan Jansz., bailiff of the Nieuwburg, and Willem Janz., the High Sheriff of Alkmaar, managed to pump the small Achtermeer lake dry, thus creating the first polder. After the successful drainage of the Achtermeer in 1533, the techniques quickly spread and the drainage of most of the large lakes began.  A little side note on the nomenclature of polders is necessary here. In the Netherlands, we differentiate between polders that are areas of land where the water-table is artificially managed, and a droogmakerij (lit. “dry-makery"). It is these droogmakerijen that are the reclaimed pieces of land that are in English usually described as being ‘polders’. 
​
The key feature of a droogmakerij was its clever use of windpower. By placing several windmills in a row, each a little higher than the previous one, and letting them pump the water upwards step by step over a much larger ‘head’ (the maximum height water can be raised with a pump).This novel idea, getrapte bemaling, would prove instrumental in the draining of larger and deeper lakes. As more of the smaller flooded areas of Holland were reclaimed, the very Dutch idea of trying to make money out of the practice started to emerge in the minds of Amsterdam’s rich merchant elite. In 1612, the large Beemster lake was successfully drained, under supervision of chief engineer and “king of the polders” Jan Adriaansz.  Leeghwater, whose surname coincidentally means “empty water” in Dutch. The project was financed by Amsterdam’s wealthiest, and the soils of the reclaimed land proved to be very fertile and thus very profitable. More and more merchants started to buy large lakes and organized drainages, several of which turned out to be large failures. In the polder Heerhugowaard, that fell dry in 1633, the soils were found to be so poor that the merchants discussed flooding the whole area again and using it for fishing grounds, as it would be the only way they would be able to make money from the whole enterprise.

​Curiously, this notion of creating land also had an impact on the mindset of the Dutch. In modern-day Holland, we often joke with the sentence “god created the earth, and then the Dutch created Holland". A fine example of how they saw the reclaimed land as their own can still be seen in the road- and canal pattern of the Beemster polder, just north of Amsterdam. The whole polder is neatly divided in squares, with smaller blocks within each large square. It is worth noting the striking resemblance that the map of the Beemster bears with the street pattern of Manhattan, New York. New York City, of course, was founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in 1624. Could these two examples of ‘new land’ have a connection? We may never know, but it is curious indeed.

For centuries, the Dutch have been waging their war with the so-called Waterwolf. But it was in the “disaster year” of 1672 that they would first discover their experiences also brought about benefits. As the Dutch Republic was attacked by England, France, the Electorate of Cologne and the Bishopric of Münster (the latter two were states within the - then mighty - Holy Roman Empire), the Dutch’ centuries-long experience with managing water would prove to be a major advantage over their opponents. With French king Louis XIV’s armies approaching rapidly from the east, an almost 60 km (37 miles) long system of sluices and dikes were constructed as quickly as possible. This system could quickly flood vast areas of land, thus forming a large barrier of water between the enemy and the major province of Holland. After its successful deterring of the French troops, it remained in active service almost continuously as more forts and better sluice systems were built. In the early nineteenth century, the system was completely redesigned on the orders of king Willem I, and rebuilt so it also encompassed the city of Utrecht. The building of forts and waterways on this enormous project continued through much of the nineteenth century, and in 1880 a second system was designed, to further protect the city of Amsterdam from all sides. While the building was still very much under way, another event occurred that changed the world forever. World War I saw the first military use of airplanes, thus rendering the whole system of forts, canals, dikes and sluices virtually useless. The whole system however is today inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list.

In more recent years, the waterwolf has become a peaceful neighbour for the Low Countries. After the catastrophic floods of 1953 and the subsequent building of one of the largest engineering projects in the world: the delta works, the Netherlands has been kept quite safe from flooding. Our most recent droogmakerij, the whole province of Flevoland, was reclaimed from the sea in 1968 and now houses almost 400,000 people. The Dutch, after centuries of experience dealing with the waterwolf, are now sought-after experts to help people all around the world with water-management. Dutch experts are currently involved in the artificial islands off the coast of Dubai, and after hurricane Katrina the Dutch have been helping rebuild and reengineer the levees of flood-stricken New Orleans. If only the French knew that ‘their’ colony is now being protected by the same technologies that once deterred them from attacking the Netherlands.
Although we now consider the waterwolf as an enemy of the past, rising seawater levels are in fact one of the biggest threats to the Netherlands. There is a saying in Dutch: “Wie water deert, die water keert”: he who daunts water, should deter water. With more than two-thirds of the country below sea level, it is of the utmost importance that we keep our rather wet history in our minds, and to keep weary of the waterwolf: our greatest friend and foe.

​JIPPE KREUNING is windmiller and graduate student in biology and archaeobotany at the University of Amsterdam. After growing up in a windmill, he became the youngest certified windmiller of the Netherlands in 2011. His current academic work involves reconstructing past food patterns in the Netherlands using botanical remains from medieval cesspits and latrines. In 2014, he rediscovered the ruins of the 9th century horizontal windmills in north-eastern Iran and works regularly in Chalk-grinding mill d’Admiraal in Amsterdam.
Author contact: jippek[at]me[dot]com

Welcome to the WatIF blog! As graduate students researching water related topics, we each have our own stories, interests and passions when it comes to water, be it an interesting not-for profit you volunteer for, your passion for water related art forms, or a really cool article you read that gave you an AHA! moment. And often we get excited to share these ideas and experiences with people of similar interests, or to learn new things outside of our “fields” of research. As water researchers, sometimes we get pigeon holed into seeing water as the subject of endless academic papers, countless hours in the lab, and endless stress, and so we tend to forget or become disconnected from why we chose to be in this field, and why we chose to study water.  

WatIF hopes to reconnect you with water in different ways and re-ignite that passion inside you. To do so we have decided to start a blog where early water leaders can share their stories/passions to inspire themselves and their peers. Grad students talk about their research endlessly, so we would like to provide a platform where you can a) articulate your research in different ways that conventional academic outlets may not allow, and b) write about other water related things that are not apart of your research but you are passion about (for example, I study long-term climate impacts to freshwater lakes, but my passion and interest lay in virtual water and sustainable water use, as well as transboundary water challenges). The best part about WatIF is that we are multi/interdisciplinary and so we will share such a wide range of posts for your reading pleasure. And the icing on the cake?! WatIF 2016 will be an international conference and so our blog posts will be written from students across the world.

In this blog, we hope to develop a network in which early water leaders and researchers can share their passions and aspirations with a water community. As always, our blog will follow WatIF’s three main pillars: community, education and empowerment. Our blog will establish an interactive community composed of interested individuals from all over the globe and from a variety of disciplines. Authors will be given a voice and thus have the opportunity to educate others about their passions, research and water related issues. Finally, we hope that this blog will provide an opportunity to empower authors to share their opinions, stories and research.  

WatIF will be posting for the blog every second week. We are extremely excited about the introduction of the blog to the WatIF website as it will be an extremely interesting method of aiding interdisciplinary communication and collaboration within the WatIF community. 

Writers for the WatIF blog will be provided an opportunity to reach a largely diverse, international audience. Authoring a piece for the blog allows young water researchers and professionals to expand their networks personally and professionally. If you are passionate about water and want to share with the WatIF community, please contact the WatIF Digital Media Coordinator, Hannah Rundle by email ([email protected]) for more information about the posting process. 

Your WatIF Conference Chair, 

Donya Danesh
PhD Canddate, Department of Biology
Queen's University | Ontario | Canada
[email protected]