“Leveraging our strategic, international partnership is critical to address challenges of water security and build planetary resilience for sustainable futures.”
Champaign, Ill. — David M. Hannah, professor of hydrology at the University of Birmingham (UoB), UNESCO chair in water sciences, and the first director of the Birmingham Institute for Sustainability & Climate Action (BISCA), will be addressing the global water crisis during a lecture on May 15.
This is the first of three lectures that are part of the BRIDGE Guest Lecture Series hosted by Illinois International during a strategic partnership visit from the UoB.
It will take place from 10:05 a.m. to 10:50 a.m. at the Beckman Institute inside Room 5602. The Beckman Institute is located at 405 N Mathews Avenue in Urbana.
UIUC Professor James Best is hosting Hannah’s lecture.
Hannah’s lecture, titled “Water in a Changing World: Addressing Global Sustainability Challenges Through Interdisciplinary Transatlantic Collaboration,” will showcase how colleagues at the UoB and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) are working together on water related issues and the UN Sustainable Development Goals at a time of unprecedented global change.
“Leveraging our strategic, international partnership is critical to address challenges of water security and build planetary resilience for sustainable futures,” according to a press release from the UoB.
Hannah’s research seeks to understand water cycle processes, hydrological events like floods and droughts, and water-related impacts under climate and other drivers of change.
“Human water use, climate change, and land conversion have created a global water crisis that threatens billions of people and endangers ecosystems worldwide,” a press release from the UoB reads. “The collective ability of humanity to ensure adequate water for society and the environment depends on understanding how our water cycle is changing across different scales and geographical contexts.”
Hannah was included in Reuters’ list of the world’s top climate scientists, and he was honored with the prestigious Tison Award in 2014 from the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS).
In 2019, he became a Royal Society Wolfson Fellow, and in 2022 he was awarded
the Murchison Award from the Royal Geographical Society.
According to his biography, Hannah uses interdisciplinary approaches to address three internationally important themes:
(1) to develop new knowledge of the climate drivers, hydrological response and habitat conditions that control water availability and river biodiversity in artic and alpine glacier-fed river basins
(2) to link variations in river flow to climate and land changes using observations and model projections and so improve understanding of the interconnected-ness of the water cycle at basin to regional to global scales
(3) to unravel multiple controls on river temperature to understand the potential of different adaptations to climate change for reducing high temperature extremes that may damage aquatic ecosystems.
In addition, he has made technological innovations in environmental sensing and helped
shape the emerging citizen science agenda around water resources.
All three lectures are also available on Zoom. To register for the lecture, and to find the Zoom link, follow this link: https://go.illinois.edu/BRIDGEguestlectures.
Analicia Haynes is the storyteller and social media specialist for Illinois International. She can be reached at ahayn2@illinois.edu.
