Thursday, April 3, 3:30 - 5 PM - E&E Forum featuring Rob McDonald, Nature Conservancy - Alumni Memorial Bldg.

 

Rob McDonald, Senior Scientist from The Nature Conservancy, will give a 45- minute presentation and then lead a discussion with participants. 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.