时间：2023年12月29日（周五） 16:00-17:30

Time: 16:00-17:30, Friday, December 29, 2023

地点：必赢76net线路云谷校区E10-304

Venue: E10-304, Yungu Campus

主持人: 必赢76net线路工学院 李凌 博士

Host: Dr. Ling Li, Chair Professor, Westlake University

语言：英文

Language: English

主讲嘉宾/Speaker：

Prof.  John Cherry

Distinguished Emeritus Professor

University of Waterloo

主讲人简介/Biography:

John Cherry's research pioneered the field of "contaminant hydrogeology". He holds geological engineering degrees from Universities of Saskatchewan and California, Berkeley, and a PhD in hydrogeology from the University of Illinois. He co-authored the textbook "Groundwater" with R.A. Freeze (1979) and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Foreign Member of the U.S. Academy of Engineering. He was the Chair of the Canadian Expert Panel on the environmental impacts of shale gas development. He has received from Singapore the Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize, 2016, and the 2020 Stockholm Water Prize and many awards and honors organizations based in the USA, UK, Switzerland and Canada.

讲座摘要/Abstract:

Climate, wars, pandemics, and recessions threaten our society's future, but the most immediate threat is disappearing fresh water. According to the World Bank (2015), “Water is reaching a tipping point” and the World Economic Forum (2021), “Water insecurity risks triggering a global food crisis.” What goes unacknowledged by these and other global policy bureaucracies is that the global water crisis has groundwater at its heart because groundwater makes up 99 % of all liquid freshwater. It supplies nearly half the global population with drinking water and supports 70 % of irrigation agriculture. Eight of the 17 UN Sustainability Goals are dependent on groundwater. With drought, groundwater is the only water for food production in many countries and many drinking-water wells go dry. The global water crisis has a paradox: there are billions of people dependent on food from groundwater irrigation, now unsustainable as many aquifers are drained beyond recovery and others nearly so. Freshwater resilience is gone. Soon, global food will have to be produced using much less irrigation.  But for another few billion, mostly rural people, there is a much different problem. They live in water poverty for which the only solution is creation of tens of millions of small low- yield wells for family water supply (for dinking, food preparation and hygiene). The global population is now 8 billion and is projected to peak at 9 billion or more in about 30 years followed by rapid decline.  Not only has peak global water apparently been reached while the demand continues to grow but we have also passed peak soil, peak seafood and peak conventional oil. Without drastic changes in agriculture and water-food governance, the future looks bleak. Survival of our civilization as we know it during these next 30 years is humanity’s primary challenge as the climate warms. The current policy focused only on reduction in human-produced greenhouse gasses without an equal or greater effort in the next few decades directed at the interrelated trajectories towards disaster for water, food and poverty puts humanity at great risk.

讲座联系人/Contact:

huangdanping@westlake.edu.cn