The prestigious conference was organized by the Global Water System Project and its International Project Office based in Bonn, Germany. Entitled 'Water in the Anthropocene: Challenges for Science and Governance. Indicators, Thresholds and Uncertainties of the Global Water System', the conference was focusing on the global dimensions of water system changes due to anthropogenic as well as natural influences.
The conference provides the platform to present global and regional perspectives of worldwide experiences on the responses of water management to global change in order to address issues such as variability in supply, increasing demands for water, environmental flows, and land use change. It helped to build links between science and policy and practice in the area of water resources management and governance, related institutional and technological innovations and identify in which ways research can assist policy and practice in the field of sustainable freshwater management.
Dr Owen Horwood, a water policy and governance expert and a Green Talent awardee from 2011, was invited to hold a presentation about “The Challenge of Change: Knowledge Implications for more Adaptive and Effective River Basin Governance”. Read the abstract here.
The second Green Talents alumni actively participating in the GWSP event is Mr Raymond Siebrits. He was invited to talk about “Water research in South Africa: results and futures from participatory processes”. Raymond is currently conducting his three-month research stay at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig. Read the abstract of his talk here.
GWSP book The Global Water System in the Anthropocene. Challenges for Science and Governance was launched in September 2014 and is available online. With selected contributions from the GWSP Conference the book reflects the shift in mind-set that is required to address the water challenges of tomorrow, discussing issues like water governance and related institutional and technological innovations as well as variability in supply, increasing demands for water, environmental flows, and land use change.
