WSSS Annual Newsletter: Spring 2012

Annual Newsletter: Spring 2012

2012 newsletter

Water: Systems, Science and Society

Contents

Introduction

WSSS at the WWF Students present at the World Water

Forum in Marseille, France

Modeling Watersheds An interview with WSSS and CEE alumna

Viki Zoltay (E09)

Where in the World? A spotlight on the research of the 2011 -

2012 WSSS Fellowship recipients

WSSS Practicums Span the Globe

We hear from the students involved in both the Middle East and the Mystic Practicums

about the location and content of their hands-on research

WSSS in Pictures

Food and Water An interview with WSSS co-founder Dr.

Beatrice Rogers, professor at the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition

Science and Policy

Year One with IGERT Update on the IGERT Water Diplomacy

program, now in its inaugural year

Valuing Water in the 21st Century

All about the third annual WSSS Symposium on April 27th, 2012

My Research in a Nutshell Two PhD students summarize their

dissertation research in 250 words or fewer

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Dear WSSS Alumni, Faculty, Students, and Colleagues, Welcome to the third annual newsletter of the Tufts interdisciplinary graduate education and research program in Water: Systems, Science and Society (WSSS). WSSS is soaring! The WSSS program began in 2004 with an enrollment of 15 students. Over the past four years WSSS enrollments have been steady, averaging about 46 students each year, with representation from six different schools. Referring to WSSS, in his inaugural address in October 2011, new Tufts President Anthony Monaco said, “only a university could assemble the range of expertise required to address water resources worldwide.” We couldn’t have said it better.

There are so many exciting initiatives and changes underway that it would be impossible to discuss them all here (but we’ll try). To begin, we are particularly excited about the two WSSS practicum projects this year, one in our own Mystic River watershed and the other in Palestine. Seven students and three WSSS faculty will be traveling to Palestine in May. Closer to home, a team of students led by Richard Vogel, Rusty Russell, and WSSS Ph.D. student Jeff Walker, is collaborating with the Mystic River Watershed Association on stormwater issues. We anticipate at least one journal publication from this collaboration, making it as much a research project as a practicum. Given the complexity of water challenges, we believe that mixing applied and fundamental research is a good thing.

Our first crop of Water Diplomacy (waterdiplomacy.tufts.edu) students has moved into their offices on the ground floor of Miller Hall. With a newly refurbished conference room and a student office area next to the Tufts Institute of the Environment (TIE), this space now serves as the hub of all WSSS activities.

WSSS faculty ranks are also expanding. New WSSS faculty include: Amahl Bishara (Anthropology); Kelsey Jack, Gilbert Metcalf, and Ekaterina Gnedenko (Economics); Magaly Koch (Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning), Kent Portney (Political Science), and Shinsuke Tanaka (Fletcher). In September 2012, Danielle Lantagne, currently a research fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, will be joining the CEE department at Tufts. We look forward to welcoming her to the WSSS Water and Health Group.

At the same time that we are thrilled about these newcomers, we will be losing two valued WSSS faculty members next year (albeit temporarily for one of them). The chair of the WSSS faculty steering committee, Richard Vogel, will be stepping down for a sabbatical leave during the 2012-13 academic year. During his sabbatical, he will continue as a research advisor to WSSS graduate students.

Unfortunately, Research Professor Annette Huber-Lee will not be returning, as she has taken a new position as Senior Advisor (eventually, Director) of the Asia Center of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) in Bangkok. Her research about applying water resource systems, economics, and game theory to resolve water conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere truly epitomizes the goals of the WSSS program. Fortunately for us, Professor Huber-Lee will continue this work at SEI, helping to ensure the success of our new Palestine Practicum continues successfully. Furthermore, now WSSS students will have new internship opportunities at SEI in southeastern Asia!

Support WSSSInterested in supporting the WSSS program? You can now donate

directly online through the Giving to Tufts website. For more information, visit www.tufts.edu/water/donate

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Once again, second-year WSSS students will be organizing the annual WSSS Symposium. This year’s event is titled, “The Glass Half Full: Valuing Water in the 21st Century” (http://www.tufts.edu/water/symposium.html) and will take place at Tufts on April 27, 2012. The conference is a collaboration between Tufts and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. With two keynote speakers, three panel discussions, a poster session, a networking session, and numerous sponsors, our third annual WSSS symposium promises to be a tremendous success. We hope to see you there!

Before closing, we would once again like to give a special thanks to the long-term and continuing generosity of John Foster, former CEO of Malcolm Pirnie and a Tufts alumnus (CEE ’52). Aside from Tufts Administration, John continues to be the single biggest supporter of our WSSS programs.

It is the vision and mission of the WSSS program to educate and support Tufts graduate students who attend to the myriad issues affecting the management of our water resources by creating a thriving intellectual community. More than ever before, “It Takes a University” to address the world’s diverse and complex water challenges. Thank you for your continued support and engagement in WSSS! WSSS Steering Committee

Richard Vogel (Director), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Tim Griffin, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy

Rusty Russell, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning

Newsletter production and design Libby Mahaffy Copy editing Alex Reisman, Emily GeoslingMaps Lenz BayasInfographic Marisol Pierce-QuinonezContributing writers Jory Hecht, Jessica Morrison, Kate Olsen, Jeff Walker, Rose WangPhotos Negin Ashoori, Andrea Brown, Emily Geosling, Rusty Russell


Graduate Students Attend World Water ForumBy Jory Hecht

In March 2012, Tufts graduate students Laura Read, Stephanie Galaitsis, Meghan Flanagan, Jory Hecht and Tianyi Luo were among 35,000 attendees at the 6th World

Water Forum (www.worldwaterforum6.org) in Marseille, France. This policy-oriented event, held every three years, convenes a diverse array of organizations involved in water resource decision-making, ranging from national and local governments to multilateral funding agencies and grassroots non-profit organizations. Activities varied from invitation-only ministerial

roundtables to come-and-go informal workshops in the Solutions Village, a museum-like exhibit featuring many of the 1,400 solutions for water and sanitation problems submitted in accordance with the forum’s “Time for Solutions” theme. Galaitsis and Read presented research as participants in the Emerging Academics Program, which brought together students from

across the world. “I think this shows how we can organize ourselves and our message so that the youth movement can impact society,” says Read, who presented some of her preliminary research on water conflict negotiation. In fact, collaboration among these young scientists has already bore some fruits, which can be viewed at www.wateryouthmovement.org.

Water piping in Tamil Nadu, India, photographed by Civil and

Environmental Engineering and WSSS students Negin Ashoori and Andrea

Brown while conducting research in July 2011


Modeling Watersheds

Civil and Environmental Engineering MS graduate Viki Zoltay (E’09) discusses her career path with Libby Mahaffy (G’11), which was heavily influenced by her participation in WSSS.

What was your experience in WSSS at Tufts?I started the Masters program in water resources engineering the first year WSSS was operating (2008). I went in with a background in groundwater remediation, but I really latched onto watershed management. I worked with Paul Kirshen (co-founder of WSSS) and Rich Vogel to get NSF funding with proposed research on collaborative water security optimization. Then I took Rich Vogel’s Water Resources Systems class which covers systems thinking and optimization and it was then that I realized, “that’s how I think!”—a lot of people have a light bulb moment in that class. For my term project I did a water-shed modeling optimization case study of the Ipswich River basin. I

ended up doing it for my master’s and got help from Rich, Paul and Kirk Westphall of CDM-Smith. We wrote a paper and presented it at conferences. When I graduated Rich really saw the value of this model so he set up presentations at watershed associations to try to spread the idea to see if there was a way to move it forward.

How did you get to where you are now?So many fortuitous things have happened, many of them simul-taneously! When we presented at the Ipswich River Watershed Association (IRWA), someone from EPA Region 1 really liked the model and that it tried to facilitate actu-ally practicing integrated water resources management. Also after that, Kerry Mackin, executive direc-tor of the IRWA, invited me to par-ticipate in an informal committee on sustainable water management in Massachusetts. When the state started a formal process for an advisory group, Kerry nominated all the people that were on this informal group, and I was selected! So now I’m part of the techni-cal subcommittee for the State’s Sustainable Water Management Initiative, which advises the State on their current initiative to de-fine safe yield and in-stream flow standards.

I got the job at Abt after finish-ing my master’s and starting my PhD, but I couldn’t get funding for continuing the modeling project at Tufts. Meanwhile, the person at EPA I mentioned earlier thought that the model could be great for municipalities to use and got fund-ing from EPA’s Research and Devel-opment arm in September (2011). We’re adding functionality to the

model I developed during my mas-ter’s and using case studies from New England municipalities to test it. It’s synergistic -- we have real world case studies so the model will hopefully provide guidance on management options to meet the standards at least cost and greatest benefits.

In my time at Abt, I have worked mainly on watershed modeling projects even though they are known for their strength as econo-mists. Now, however, we have a well-developed interdisciplinary team of economists, environmen-tal/natural resource economists, engineers and public policy special-ists. So this project was ideal for Abt! We are fortunate to have Rich as a consultant on the model de-velopment -- his expertise will help to ensure the model continues to be developed into something use-ful! I know so many water people in the Northeast; it feels great to be connected in this community.

Given your perspective from the field, what’s up-and-com-ing in water resource manage-ment right now?Environmental economics: It’s helpful to put a dollar amount on ecosystem services, put a value on managing water resources and the environment in general, espe-cially if what needs to be done is going to have a lot of direct costs and indirect benefits. Ecosystems services such as trees cleaning the air or wetlands cleaning and storing water allow us, humans, to exist. Environmental economics gives you some tools for valuing those services and that’s what we do at Abt all the time. We do the

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Andrea Brown Land surface predictors of diarrheal diseases: a spatial comparison of urban slum and rural villages in southern India Advisor: Elena Naumova Department: Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)

Negin AshooriWater Consumption Pat-terns and Enteric Infection Transmission: A Case Study in Vellore, IndiaAdvisor: Elena NaumovaDepartment: CEE

Claudio Deola Water Related Diseases among Crises-Affected Urban Dis-placed: A Review Advisors: David Gute, Jeffrey GriffithsSchools: Fletcher, Friedman

Jeffrey Bate A Smart Grid Approach to Water: The Value of Infor-mation For Adaptive Water Supply Management Advisors: Rich Vogel, Steve Chapra, Jim Limbrunner Department: CEE (EWRE)

Ana RosnerDetecting the Power of Climate Trends: A New Decision Tree Meth-odology to Assess Risks and Costs of Adapting to an Uncertain FutureAdvisors: Rich Vogel, Paul Kir-shen, Elena NaumovaDepartment: CEE

Rose Yuan Wang Realizing Flexibility in Water Conflict Resolution Advisors: Steve Chapra, Shafiqul Islam Department: CEE

Jennifer (Yaning) Shen Water and Fertilizer Ef-ficiency in Rice Production: A Case Study in the Krishna River Basin, IndiaAdvisors: Jeffrey Zabel, Rich Vogel, David DapiceDepartment: Economics

Sarah ColemanStrengthening Agroforestry Projects & Impact Assess-ment in Huehuetenango, GuatemalaAdvisor: Timothy GriffinSchool: Friedman

2011 - 2012 WSSS Fellows


The Key of Return at the entranceway of Aida Camp was created by residents of the camp and symbolizes the refugee’s Right of Return to their homes. The key was removed on March 12, 2012, and was placed on loan to an art exhibition in Berlin, Germany.

A mural at the entrance to Aida Camp welcomes visitors. Aida Camp was established in 1950 for Palestinian refugees who were forced from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Clean Water as a Human RightBy Jessica MorrisonThe 2012 WSSS Middle East Practicum team is partnering with the Lajee Center (lajee.org), a social justice organization based in Aida Refugee Camp in the West Bank to establish a water quality testing program. Concerns have been raised over the quality of water, a scarce resource within the camp. Coordinating with the Lajee Center, the practicum team will conduct baseline public health surveys and develop a citizen-driven water quality testing program that can be maintained by the Lajee Center. Additionally, the interdisciplinary practicum team will increase awareness of water quality issues by educating women and children on the importance of clean water as a human right and giving them a forum to voice their concerns and questions about water quality.

The team will be traveling to the West Bank from May 11-19, 2012, where they will conduct training and information sessions for women and youth volunteers from the Camp. Volunteers will be educated on the importance of water quality testing, sampling and analysis procedures, and methods to reduce risks from poor water quality. The practicum team and volunteers will collect water samples from drinking water sources throughout the Camp for analysis. The initial sampling results will provide baseline data

for the team to identify key sampling locations to be incorporated into the water testing program. Another legacy of the partnership between WSSS and the Lajee Center will be a part-time paid position to run the water quality testing program in Aida Camp. The Lajee Center will sponsor the position while the practicum team will provide the specific water quality and data management training. The practicum team consists of seven graduate students: Jessica Morrison and Stephanie Galaitsis (Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)), Adam Weinberg and Franklin Crump (Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning (UEP)), Elliot Hohn (Agriculture, Food, and Environment (AFE)), Maggie Holmes (AFE and the Public Health Program at Tufts Medical School), and Kate McMahon (AFE and Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy). The students are advised by John Durant, (CEE), Rusty Russell (UEP), Amahl Bishara (Anthropology) and visiting scholar, Annette Huber-Lee.

From the Mystic to the Middle East: WSSS Practicums Span the Globe


Jeff Walker presents the study results on behalf of the practicum team to the Mystic River Watershed Association on April 3rd, 2012

The WSSS Aberjona Practicum team has been working closely with the Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA) and the municipalities of Winchester, Woburn, Reading, and Burlington to address stormwater pollution in the Aberjona River watershed.

Under a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, MyRWA contracted Tufts to identify optimal locations in each of the four municipalities for best management practices (BMPs) to reduce stormwater pollution to the Aberjona River. Under the direction of Ph.D. candidate Jeff Walker, the group developed a novel methodology for estimating phosphorus loads from individual sub-catchments. This approach, which uses a Geographic Information System (GIS) to incorporate stormwater pipe networks, topography, soil types, and land use, has promising implications for stormwater modeling. At the end of the project.,the team plans to submit this work for peer-reviewed publication. As part of the practicum, the group will also develop a decision support tool to aid and inform town engineers, conservation commissioners and planners in stormwater BMP implementation. In order to provide insight into the public understanding of

stormwater pollution and management, the group has tailored a public perception survey. This will ultimately help MyRWA and the municipalities direct public education and engagement of stormwater issues in the future.

The practicum’s unique blend of scholarly research, faculty and Ph.D. student engagement, and community collaboration provides an exciting new model for

community-based research in the WSSS program. This project which engages four local communities as well as many WSSS students and faculty both generates practical results for the communities in the Mystic River Watershed and tests new methods that have broad applicability in the

field of stormwater management. The Aberjona Practicum team is comprised of Civil & Environmental Engineering students Jeff Walker, Ruiruo Wu, Yudan Jiang, and Shuo Zhao; Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning students Laura Crossley, Anne Sexton, Gabrielle Gareau, and Kate Olson; Nutrition and Public Health student Glennon Beresin; and is advised by two WSSS faculty, Rich Vogel and Rusty Russell.

Close to Home, Far-Reaching ImplicationsBy Jeff Walker and Kate Olsen

WSSS Practicums Span the Globe


WSSS in pictures

WSSS students and faculty conduct research around the world


WSSS field trips to the Aberjona watershed and Woodstock, New Hampshire

The second annual WSSS Symposium


Food and WaterDr. Beatrice Rogers (pictured above in Bolivia) is a professor at the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and Program Director of the Food Policy & Applied Nutrition program. In her 30 years at Tufts, she has done a range of environmental, economic and food policy research, and in 2008 she co-founded WSSS. Her most recent work has taken her abroad to study the persistent impacts of food aid programs after they have shut down. Here, as told to TIE’s Libby Mahaffy (G’11), Dr. Rogers discusses this research, including findings related to water, and explains how a food policy expert such as herself came to found WSSS.

Why Honduras, Bolivia, India, and Kenya were chosen as sites for researching food aid programs that had shut down:In 2007, USAID changed its policies as to which countries were eligible to get Title II food aid, which gave us the opportunity to study them. [To participate], the countries had

to volunteer. We really wanted to do Honduras and Bolivia because both had formal exit strategies. They had workshops and devel-oped matrices of sustainability benchmarks. At first we were only going to do Bolivia, Kenya and Hon-duras, but an advocate for India got the Indian USAID Mission to buy in, so we were able to add that fourth country. We’re still in the middle of our work in India, but finishing up in Bolivia, Honduras, and Kenya.

Water-related successes resulting directly from the food aid programs in these places: [One key success has been] the de-velopment of piped water systems in Honduras and Bolivia. These are community-based systems with an elected board that manages the program; they charge monthly fees for the water, which provide funds for repair and maintenance. Community members have been trained in repair and maintenance techniques, but they’ve also been trained in management—keeping the books.

The model from Honduras and Bolivia, it seems to me, is super promising. It’s a nice self-contained system, and it looks like it will be sustainable in both Honduras and Bolivia. The reason is that it com-bines a number of success factors for sustainability: technical and managerial capacity, fulfilling a felt need in the community, and a guaranteed source of material support: it has a budget. We really have concluded that you need all of those things: money, motiva-tion – that is, people recognizing there’s a benefit and demanding it—and in addition, there has to be both technical and managerial capacity.

In Kenya, some of the water sys-tems have been promising in terms of sustainability. There are places where it’s simply not feasible to pipe water to people’s homes, so it’s more a matter of building a reli-able well with a fence around it to protect it from contamination by animals, things like that.

Factoring in water quality: Georgia Kayser (G’11), did her PhD in the Fletcher school on water purification systems in Hondu-ras, looking at microbiological contamination. One of the things that we found—and I wouldn’t have thought to ask about it if it weren’t for Georgia—is that the piped water systems are working, but the purification is not. Systems are getting repaired, the fees are being paid—it’s all working, but there has not been an emphasis on verifying the quality of the water. I didn’t get the sense that they were doing microbiological test-ing, and in only a few places were they chlorinating. If we ever get the opportunity to go back, I think


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it would be interesting to look at water quality, including the micro-biological quality of the water.

The impetus for WSSS:I had the original idea for the WSSS program but it’s not because I’m a water researcher—it’s because I’m really interested in the poten-tial for interdisciplinary research and education. And water is made for interdisciplinary study, in the same way that nutrition is. One of the reasons I like the School of Nutrition is that it’s fundamentally interdisciplinary and has an inter-disciplinary vision. At one point the school applied for an IGERT inter-disciplinary grant based on food security. We didn’t get it, but that was what gave me this idea that water ramified into all of these dif-ferent areas.

Getting WSSS started and gathering momentum:[Former Tufts President] Larry Bacow really was interested in

breaking down the silos, promot-ing interdisciplinary activity, and he put out a request for proposals. I happened to be at a meeting that had nothing to do with this when Paul Kirshen mentioned his work at the engineering school on water issues. I talked to him during a coffee break and we got to talking about this idea and decided to take it a step further. We sent e-mails to everybody we could think of about an interdisciplinary water program. It was a little kernel of an idea, but the senior administration was interested, and Tufts has many unique advantages in this area: a long-term focus on environment and environmental policy—TIE goes back a long way, UEP goes back a long way. That interest in environmental issues is very much Tufts. We have an engineer-ing school with strength in water research, a core of faculty that’s interested in water, and Fletcher with its diplomacy focus—so much

of conflict is based on water. We have an agriculture program in the Nutrition School—water is pretty important for agriculture; we have an interest in water and health and so does the public health program in the Medical School.

At that first meeting there must have been 30 or 35 people, and the energy was great. We de-veloped a little proposal, Water: Systems, Science and Society. The Provost put in money, which made it possible to go ahead...and it has taken off. It’s achieved the size and integration into the participating schools that means that it’s re-ally here to stay, and that makes me feel very satisfied. I feel very involved even though I haven’t been a regular attendee and I don’t teach a water-based course. My research is focused on food policy. I was delighted when water turned out to be an important piece of this current sustainability study.

Persistence of Food Aid Impacts Study Sites


Water Diplomacy Making Waves at TuftsBy Libby Mahaffy (G’11)

The inaugural year of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Water Diplomacy program is underway, and “off to an excellent start,” according to Dr. Kent Portney, Political Science professor and co-Principal Investigator (PI). Dr. Shafiqul Islam, the PI from engineering, explains that the program—which was started by a grant awarded to Tufts by the National Science Foundation (NSF)—aims to create “actionable knowledge” about water conflicts through interdisciplinary collaboration and research.

The six students of the inaugural cohort are Meghan Flanagan, Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE); Laura Read, CEE; Jory Hecht, CEE; Rose Yuan Wang, CEE; Laura Kuhl, Fletcher; and Andrew Tirrell, Fletcher. In addition to their own PhD research—which ranges from climate change adaptation to watershed modeling—IGERT students focus on a water diplomacy case study. This year’s case is the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint (ACF) River Basin, a watershed shared by Georgia, Alabama, and Florida.

To Laura Read, this is “the perfect water conflict,” as lawsuits over ACF water uses have reached the US Supreme Court on multiple occasions. The students’ findings will have important implications for strategically managing multi-year droughts within the context of climate change. And they are already getting the word out: in less than a year, this IGERT cohort has already presented individual and group research at national and international conferences, and many plan to publish in the coming months.

Though IGERT is new to campus, – the Tufts Institute of the Environment was renovated and expanded in 2011 to accommodate the incoming PhD candidates – its students have already created ownership over the

program, working to refine it further and negotiating their research and group projects. Read, who has a background in biology and engineering, appreciates the freedom and interdisciplinary nature of the IGERT. “I have no restrictions, and in fact I’m encouraged to be not just an engineer,” she says. “It supports my natural tendencies.”

Interdisciplinary support has long been a strength of Tufts, especially when it comes to water. The Water: Systems, Science and Society (WSSS) graduate

certificate program was founded in 2004 by an engineer, Dr. Paul Kirshen, and nutrition professor, Dr. Bea Rogers (see page 10 for an interview on Dr. Rogers’s current research), with the charge of providing “interdisciplinary perspectives and tools to manage water related problems around the world.” In fact, IGERT’s interdisciplinary approach to water diplomacy “is absolutely necessary,” says Laura Kuhl, an IGERT student who completed the WSSS certificate along with her Master’s from the Fletcher School last year, “because the types of problems that we’re interested in can’t be solved in a disciplinary context.”

But the best thing about the IGERT so far? According to Portney, it’s “the quality of the students we have attracted, and by all accounts will continue to attract.” Because of their diverse backgrounds, the students are motivated, “thirsty”—“the engineering students want to know more about the policy, economic, and cultural contexts in which they work; the social science students are looking for the technical details.” The momentum is clear: after a strong first year, another six students will be admitted into the program for fall 2012. “All in all,” he says, “it’s hard to not be impressed.”


watershed modeling to determine the improvement in water quality from proposed EPA regulations but then we also have to say what it’s worth.

Ecosystems services valuation is a huge field right now. Environmen-tal externalities are not accounted for in the economic system, so water resource managers not only have to quantify the benefit of ap-propriate water resources manage-ment for a healthy environment but also figure out the value and make the economic case for it. [For example, it’s not only that] the river will have less sediment in it, but you have to tell them that it’ll

allow this much more fish habitat, which will improve fisheries yields by this much, which will add this much value to the economy and to recreational fishers and this much savings in drinking water treatment plant costs and when you add that all up, look at all that benefit! It’s not just that the water is less murky. Our job has gone from saying “How can we improve the environment?” to saying “How can we make the best economic case for it?”

What’s next for you?My plan for the next year and a half is to get this model devel-oped and useful so EPA can make

it publicly available, which would be unbelievable! In the future I’m hoping to gain a lot of experience so I can keep working on directly relevant projects more efficiently and better. I see myself continuing to work on watershed manage-ment and making the case for it, that is integrated water and re-sources management. But I’m not sure if I’ll get a PhD or stay at Abt or maybe go to Australia and learn from them because they’re so far ahead in integrated water resourc-es management. Maybe I’ll get my PhD in Australia! [laughs]

Viki Zoltay (continued from page 6)


Building upon the success of previous two years’ efforts, the third annual WSSS symposium will take place April 27, 2012. For the first time, this year’s symposium, “The Glass Half Full: Valuing Water in the 21st Century,” is a joint effort with the Water Resources Research Center (WRRC) at UMass Amherst. The organizing team comprises students from various departments and is supported by staff and faculty members of both universities. Academic communities and water professionals around the region are invited to attend. We hope you will join the discussion!

Our symposium’s central theme, water valuation, responds to the increasing necessity to unify the concepts and methodologies of valuing water. The theories and practices of valuing water vary across disciplines, and may depend on different geographic, socioeconomic, and cultural factors. Throughout the conference day, we will be exploring a various issues related to water valuation, including environmental flows, extreme water events (scarcity and floods), and water quality. We will explore questions such as: How do we reach across disciplines to create a standard for valuing water? How can water valuation help us identify cost-effective solutions to manage extreme water events in the future? And how can water valuation standards help policymakers in developed and developing nations select the best solutions for maintaining a clean water supply?

The agenda includes two keynote addresses, three panel discussions, poster session and competition with 28 entrants, as well as networking sessions. The symposium opens with remarks by Dr. Richard Vogel, director of the WSSS program, and Paula Rees, director of the UMass WRRC program. The first keynote address features Dr. Jerry Delli Priscoli, senior advisor to US Army Corps of Engineers at the Institute for Water Resources. For 30 years Dr. Delli Priscoli has designed and run social assessment, public participation, and conflict resolution research and training programs. He has encouraged the U.S. Corps of Engineers’ transformation toward open administration and advocacy of environmental ethics. The second keynote address features Dr. Ximing Cai, a Ven Te Chow Faculty Scholar of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois. Dr. Cai will discuss on how to blend economics, water resources, and hydrology to assist decision-making in systems that integrate manmade and natural elements. Tufts University President Dr. Tony Monaco will offer closing remarks before a cocktail reception, networking and poster prize announcements.

We are grateful to our primary sponsors Fuss & O’Neill and Industrial Economics Incorporated (IEc); general sponsors First Light, New England Interstate Water Pollution Control Commission (NEIWPCC), Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), the Cadmus Group, Inc., CEI, CDM

Smith, and Geosyntec Consultants; as well as our underwriting sponsors USGS and Tufts Institute of the Environment (TIE). We also appreciate the Department of Environmental Protection Massachusetts (MassDEP) for providing judges for the student poster competition.

Please visit the following website for more details about the program, registration, and sponsorships: www.tufts.edu/water/symposium

Third Annual WSSS Symposium to Highlight the Value of Water in the 21st CenturyBy Yuan Wang


WSSS Symposium AgendaOpening Welcome by Rich Vogel, WSSS Director, and Paula Rees, WRRC Director

Morning Keynote Address by Jerry Delli Priscoli

Panel 1: The Value of Clean WaterPanelists: Elena Naumova, Daniele Lantagne, Jeff Griffiths, Janine SelendyModerator: Steve ChapraEvery year, unsafe water—coupled with a lack of basic sanitation—kills at least 1.6 million children under the age of five. The need for clean drinking water and importance of water in sanitation pose profound challenges to meet the global Millennium Development Goals—but are present strategies working? This panel will identify the failures and future challenges of water sanitation in the developing and developed world.

Panel 2: Scarcity and FloodsPanelists: Katherine Meierdiercks, Casey Brown, Stephen Estes-Smargiassi, Peter WeiskelModerator: Jim Limbrunner Floods and droughts are natural occurrences within the hydrologic cycle, but they have significant impacts on food production, water supply, and social welfare. Moreover, climate models predict that our changing climate is likely to cause more frequent and intense extreme events. This panel will investigate how to manage them.

Lunchtime Student Poster Session

Afternoon Keynote Address by Ximing Cai

Panel 3: Valuation of Environmental FlowsPanelists: Kathy Baskin, Sharon Davis, Mark Smith, Robert JohnstonModerator: William MoomawResearch over the past several decades has indicated that human-induced alteration to natural flow regimes in terrestrial waterways has caused significant damage to aquatic and riparian ecosystems. This panel examines the value of water’s environmental benefits within the context of river management. As continued urbanization and other global changes affect the interface between nature and society, how can aquatic environmental protection be valued against other societal needs?

Closing Remarks by Tony Monaco, Tufts President

Networking Reception


“My Phd research for the IGERT Water Diplomacy fellowship program, like the master’s degree I completed for Fletcher last year, focuses on climate change adaptation and water. The tentative title for my dissertation will be “Climate Adaptation and Water: Exploring Policy Options for Vulnerable Populations.” It involves two distinct projects.

One project is a collaboration with the Global Environment Facility (GEF) analyzing technology transfer in their approximately 90 adaptation projects throughout the world. By examining the types of technology transfer and potential barriers to the process, Professor Gallagher (Director of the Energy, Climate, & Innovation Research Program and Associate Professor of Energy & Environmental Policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts) and I are hoping to better understand the technology transfer issues that are unique to adaptation.

My other project is part of a NOAA-funded study looking at coastal adaptation in environmental justice communities and how to engage these communities in adaptation planning. One aspect of particular interest to me is evacuation as an adaptation option for environmental justice communities, and I have used East Boston as a case study in my research. I recently presented findings at the National Evacuation Conference. In our paper, WSSS co-founder Paul Kirshen, who is also an investigator on this project, and I discuss the challenges faced by environmental justice communities adapting to coastal flooding, as well as the policy implications of climate change for evacuation planning.”

Laura Kuhl The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy


“My PhD research is part of a larger effort by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences Inc. (CUAHSI)

to facilitate both the publication and the discovery of data from water-related science. It is funded under the NSF-sponsored project entitled “Geoinformatics: Development of Community-Based Ontology and Standards for Hydrologic Data Discovery and Exchange,” under the direction of Dr. Richard P. Hooper (CUAHSI), Dr. David Valentine (San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD), Dr. Ilya Zaslavsky (San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD) and Dr. Michael Piasecki (Civil Engineering, CCNY).My direct academic adviser is Dr. Alva Couch (Computer Science, Tufts University). I focus on the problem of data discovery—specifically, questions related to learning more from the search interactions between hydrologic data providers and the researchers who use their data, and making it easier to query a global collection of water-related data. For example, while metadata conventions for water information have traditionally had research group and application-specific origins, how could we allow users to describe the information they are seeking from the system so that their vocabulary becomes a part of the search experience, and what incentives do we need to create to encourage this to happen? My activities have been focused on demonstrating the usefulness of an approach called “faceted search,” which allows multiple dimensions of metadata to be specified in an interactive sequence of searches. Faceted search is useful for measuring the complexity of hydrologic data search tasks, but I am evolving these components into new data discovery interfaces to further my research. Ultimately, my research asks, ‘How can we create a naming system for hydrologic data so that those who publish and search for water-related data can share and build on each other’s efforts?’ The pieces of the answer I am working on now are a unique effort to use technology to combine the top-down influence of existing large hydrologic data publishers with the bottom-up information about how downstream users search for and label data for their own reference. I can genuinely say I am excited about where it will lead.”

Alex Bedig Civil and Environmental Engineering


Water: Systems, Science and Society is a graduate research and education program

that provides Tufts students with interdisciplinary perspectives and tools

to manage water-related problems around the world.

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210 Packard Ave | Medford, MA 02155 | (617) 627-5522 | http://www.tufts.edu/water

WSSS Annual Newsletter: Spring 2012

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Transcript of WSSS Annual Newsletter: Spring 2012