Data, decision-making, and disaster readiness

November 13

Agenda

10:00 AM Day three welcome + Special recorded talk by Henk Ovink

10:15 AM Panel: Using Data to Drive Decisions

11:15 AM Break + open Zoom room

11:30 AM Keynote: Kaveh Madani

12:30 PM Break + open Zoom room

KEYNOTE:

“Decision Making + Water Management in a Changing World”

Kaveh Madani

Henry Hart Rice Senior Fellow, MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University; Former Deputy Head, Department of Environment in Iran

Dr. Kaveh Madani, an environmental scientist, educator, and activist, interfaces science, policy, and society, focused on human-natural systems and raising awareness and community around complex environmental issues. Madani, dubbed “Iran’s Expat Eco-warrior” by international media, has served as the Deputy Vice President of Iran in his position as the Deputy Head of Iran’s Department of Environment, the Vice President of the UN Environment Assembly Bureau, and the Chief of Iran’s Department of Environment’s International Affairs and Conventions Center. His work has gained international attention for its incorporation of game theory and decision analysis into solutions for water resource management and conflict-resolution and the use of cross-disciplinary approaches to guide policy-making for challenges across water, food, energy, and climate sectors.

With live presentations from:

Andrew Young

Knowledge Director, The GovLab

Andrew is the Knowledge Director at The GovLab, where he leads research on the impact of technology on public institutions. At the GovLab and with the recently concluded MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance, he undertakes collaborative action research projects with institutional partners across sectors and disciplines. His work ranges from establishing responsible data handling guidance for international humanitarian organizations to developing methodologies for leveraging private-sector data to serve the public interest. As Knowledge Director, Andrew also seeks to make GovLab’s research more accessible and actionable, and to capture the real-world impacts of these efforts. His work has been published Nature, Harvard Business Review, Social Science Innovation Review, and Governing, amongst others. In addition to open governance, his work and research interests include privacy, internet activism, design and ethical implications of using new technologies in politics.

Newsha Ajami

Director of Urban Water Policy, Water in the West at Stanford University

Newsha Ajami is the director of Urban Water Policy with Stanford University’s Water in the West program. A leading expert in sustainable water resource management, smart cities, and the water-energy-food nexus, she uses data science principles to study the human and policy dimensions of urban water and hydrologic systems. Her research throughout the years has been interdisciplinary and impact focused. Dr. Ajami is a two-term gubernatorial appointee to the Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control Board. She is a member of National Academies Board on Water Science and Technology. Dr. Ajami also serves on number of state-level and national advisory boards. Before joining Stanford, she worked as a senior research scholar at the Pacific Institute, and served as a Science and Technology fellow at the California State Senate’s Natural Resources and Water Committee where she worked on various water and energy related legislation. She has published many highly cited peer-reviewed articles, coauthored two books, and contributed opinion pieces to the New York Times, San Jose Mercury and the Sacramento Bee.

And a special pre-recorded presentation from:

Henk Ovink

Special Envoy for International Water Affairs, Kingdom of The Netherlands; Sherpa to the High Level Panel on Water

Henk Ovink was appointed in 2015 by the Dutch Cabinet as the first Special Envoy for International Water Affairs. As the Ambassador for Water, he is responsible for advocating water awareness around the world, building institutional capacity and coalitions amongst governments, multilateral organizations, the private sector, and NGO’s, and initiating innovative approaches to address the world’s pressing water needs. Through this work and his role as Sherpa to the UN/World Bank High Level Panel on Water, Ovink has been recognized for his “transformative global water work”, and has served on President Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, developed and led the "Rebuild by Design" competition, and initiated the National Disaster Resilience Competition. Before joining the Task Force, Ovink was both Acting Director General of Spatial Planning and Water Affairs and Director of National Spatial Planning for the Netherlands.

DAY 3 PANELS

Using data to drive decisions

Credible and clear water quality data is a necessity for ensuring human and ecosystem health, and there has been an increasing emphasis on improving water quality monitoring and aptly visualizing data over the last few decades, driven by the digital revolution. But how is water quality monitoring working, and what are the barriers to its improved use for decision-makers? In this panel, explore what the digital revolution has enabled us to do with water quality monitoring, and more importantly, what having accurate water quality data can do to improve systems and policy-making.

Watch the full panel recording

Panelists:

Gary Wong

Principal, Global Water Industry at OSIsoft

Gary Wong is the Principal, Global Water Industry at OSIsoft, a leader in real-time operational intelligence. He has over 20 years of extensive international experience providing sustainable, strategic and cost-effective business solutions in the water industry. Prior to joining OSIsoft, he has held positions with Metro Vancouver and as a consultant directing both public and private sectors on Operations, IT strategy, planning, sustainability, and engineering. Mr. Wong is also the Chairman of the Smart Water Networks Forum (SWAN) Americas Alliance. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemical Engineering, is registered as a Professional Engineer in Computer Engineering, and holds an M.B.A. from the Queen’s School of Business and is also a Chartered Professional Accountant. 

Charlene Ren

Founder, MyH20 Water Information Network

Charlene Ren is the founder of MyH2O Water Information Network, a volunteer-based platform that connects clean water resources to rural communities. Water and sanitation data from over thousands of villages have been collected since 2015, and solutions have been delivered to over thousands of beneficiaries. She received her B.A. in Physics from Vassar College and dual M.S. in Environmental Engineering & Technology and Policy at MIT, with a thesis focused on the water and sanitation monitoring policy structure in rural India. She was selected as 1 of 4 Chinese representatives for Homeward Bound 2018 fellow, an initiative focused on raising profiles of women leaders in STEM, ending in a 3-week training expedition in Antarctica. She’s also a 2016 Echoing Green Fellow, BBC 100 Woman (2019) and Forbes “30 Under 30” (2019) in the Social Entrepreneur category. 

Donald Brooks

CEO, Initiative: EAU

Donald Brooks is Chief Executive Officer of Initiative: Eau, an American NGO dedicated to strengthening WASH capacity in developing areas and crisis zones.  Initiative: Eau currently operated in Burkina Faso and Nigeria and is in consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Concurrently, Donald is a strategy consultant specialized in public health and  conflict & security with Dalberg Advisors.  He is based in Dakar, Senegal.  Formerly, he was a Fulbright Fellow with U.S. Embassy Ouagadougou investigating urban water quality in small- and medium-sized cities to inform infrastructure investment to reduce water-borne disease.  Donald holds a degree in molecular biology and global health from Harvard University. Previously, he was a research fellow in immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard FAS Center for Systems Biology and a research associate with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

Robert Bain

Statistics and monitoring specialist, UNICEF

Robert Bain is a Statistics Specialist at UNICEF and has been a member of the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene for the last 6 years. Prior to joining UNICEF he worked at the Universities of North Carolina and Bristol on research related to drinking water quality and water policy. He has a masters of Environmental Engineering from the University of Cambridge and was an exchange student at MIT.  

+ Luis Montestruque,

Vice President of Digital Solutions, Xylem

Moderated by:

Wenjin Zhang

PhD candidate, Northeastern University

Wenjin Zhang is a PhD candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on informatics for decision and control of civil and environmental infrastructure systems, including sensing technology and data science applied to wastewater treatment and process control. She actively helps host workshop series that bringing together the field engineers/applicators and researchers of New England community to share experiences related to water treatment challenges. She also served as a mentor to rising undergrads in Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program in the past years.

Moderated by: Wenjin Zhang (PhD Student, Northeastern)

Disaster resilience

Sea levels are rising, and droughts, storms and other weather events are becoming more frequent and more extreme, as a result of the inextricable link between water and climate change. By bringing together experts focused on predictive tools and response systems, this panel seeks to find climate resilient solutions and create connections between modeling and techniques and those affected by disasters, under the uncertainty and pressure of a changing climate. We will look to understand how we might become proactive and not reactive to shifting climate trends and disasters. 

Watch the full panel recording

Panelists:

David Groves

Codirector, RAND Climate Resilience Center at RAND Corporation

David Groves is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, codirector of the RAND Climate Resilience Center, codirector of the RAND Center on Decision Making Under Uncertainty, and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He works on climate change adaptation, mitigation, and resilience, helping organizations and government agencies to understand future climate risks and develop strategies that will work despite the tremendous uncertainty about the future. He is a key developer of methods for decisionmaking under deep uncertainty. He has pioneered their use to support water resources planning and coastal management, including for Louisiana’s 50-year, $50 billion Coastal Master Plan and Puerto Rico’s $130 billion economic and disaster recovery plan. He is currently partnering with researchers and policy makers in Costa Rica and Chile to evaluate their national decarbonization plans under uncertainty.

Anita van Breda

Senior Director, Environment and Disaster Management at WWF

Anita van Breda is the Senior Director of Environment and Disaster Management at World Wildlife Fund (WWF) based in Washington, DC. She is an environmental advisor and trainer who works to integrate the environment into disaster management and climate change adaptation. In her role at WWF, she is leading a team that focuses on how to “rebuild safer and greener.” Anita has worked worldwide for the last  15 years applying WWF’s nature-based approaches to advance environmentally responsible disaster recovery, reconstruction, and risk reduction working with local and global humanitarian and environmental agencies,  the United Nations, the US government, academic partners,  the World Bank, The Sphere Project, Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement partners, and the private sector.

Chris Funk

Director, Climate Hazards Center at UCSB

Chris Funk is the Director of the Climate Hazards Center (CHC) at UC Santa Barbara. He works with an international team of Earth scientists to inform weather and famine-related disaster responses. Chris studies climate and climate change while also developing improved data sets and monitoring/prediction systems. In 2020 Chris and Shrad Shukla published a book on Drought Early Warning and Forecasting. In early 2021, Cambridge Press will publish Dr. Funk’s Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes. While his research interests are quite diverse, a central theme uniting Chris’ work is developing both the technical/scientific resources and the conceptual frameworks that will help us cope with increasingly dangerous climate and weather extremes.

Pamela Silva Diaz

Mechanical and public health engineer, MIT D-Lab Design Workshop facilitator

Pamela Cristina Silva Díaz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and completed her bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012. She obtained her Master of Science in the same field at the University of Michigan in 2014. After working for over two years in the aerospace industry, she joined the Hurricane María humanitarian response team with Oxfam America in 2017, focusing on studying and addressing Water, Sanitation and Hygiene challenges in rural communities of Puerto Rico. With MIT D-Lab and other groups, she has led community-based projects focused on appropriate technology, climate change adaptation, community resilience and humanitarian innovation. 

Moderated by:

Deborah Campbell

Senior Staff, MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Dr. Deborah J. Campbell is a Senior Staff member in the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems (HADR) Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. She is leading the Laboratory’s Climate Change Initiative which leverages the Laboratory’s deep technical expertise, and collaborations with MIT campus, to help address global climate challenges, and improve global stability and national security. She is helping lead MIT’s Climate Resilience Early Warning System Network (CREWSnet) project, a collaboration between MIT campus, Lincoln Laboratory and BRAC.  Prior to joining the HADR Group, Dr. Campbell served as an Associate Technology Officer in the Laboratory's Director’s Office. At Lincoln Laboratory, Dr. Campbell has applied her analytical chemistry expertise to chemical and biological threat detection, forensics and attribution, and led a significant portfolio of programs in these areas.