Join us for the next Baker Center Energy and Environment Forum, which will 
take place on Thursday, April 3, 2014 at 3:30 pm. 

Please note: for this meeting of the Forum only, we will be meeting in Alumni 
Memorial Building, Room 27 (1408 Middle Drive, large building next door to 
Neyland Stadium) as opposed to the Baker Center’s Toyota Auditorium. 

Rob McDonald, Senior Scientist from The Nature Conservancy, will give a 45-
minute presentation and then lead a discussion with participants. This talk has 
been rescheduled following a postponement last month. Rob’s talk is entitled: 

Water on an urban planet: urbanization, drinking water, and source watershed 
conservation 

Abstract: Urban growth is increasing the demand for freshwater resources, yet 
surprisingly the water sources of the world’s large cities have never been 
globally assessed, hampering efforts to assess the distribution and causes of 
urban water stress. In this talk, McDonald will discuss the results from the first 
global survey of the large cities’ water sources and show that previous global 
hydrologic models that ignored urban water infrastructure significantly 
overestimated urban water stress. He will also talk about which cities are most 
dependent on the natural world for the maintenance of raw water quality and 
where source watershed conservation is likely to have the greatest financial 
return on investment in terms of avoided costs for operations and maintenance 
and new capital construction projects.

Rob McDonald is Senior Scientist for Urban Sustainability at The Nature 
Conservancy, the world’s largest environment focused nonprofit. His research 
examines the impact and dependencies of cities on the natural world, and he 
leads much of the Conservancy’s urban conservation work. He has also written 
extensively on the effect of U.S. energy policy on natural habitat and water 
use. Prior to joining the Conservancy, McDonald was a Smith Conservation 
Biology Fellow at Harvard University, studying the impact that global urban 
growth will have on biodiversity and conservation. He also taught landscape 
ecology at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
The Baker Center Energy and Environment Forum is an opportunity for 
academics to share their research findings to a broad set of academics, 
researchers, and students from outside their own discipline but who have a 
common interest in environmental and energy issues. For more information 
about the Baker Center Energy and Environment forum visit the forum’s 
website: 
http://web.utk.edu/~jlarivi1/bcinter.html.

Please join us for what promises to be a very interesting discussion and 
presentation.

Paul Armsworth, College of Arts and Sciences
Jacob LaRiviere, College of Business Administration 
Becky Jacobs, College of Law
Chris Clark, College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources