Βι¶ΉΣ³» the Global Water Center
The Βι¶ΉΣ³»’s Global Water Center: Solutions for Sustainability is a response to societal demands for creative, integrative approaches in addressing complex issues related to water resources. The Global Water Center’s mission is to solve large-scale and long-term problems related to water sustainability.
The Center accomplishes this mission by providing a physical venue, organizational structure, and a collaborative culture to foster scientific interaction and discovery, pursue emerging research opportunities, and address stakeholder concerns in an efficient and timely manner. Center Faculty educate and train the next generation of scientists to tackle emerging water issues by providing them with a wide breadth of knowledge and conceptual thinking needed to communicate scientific findings to an often disengaged or unaware public.
Our plan to solve water issues
We band together interdisciplinarily to seek solutions that optimize water use, moving towards a sustainable lifestyle in these ways:
- Partner: Strengthen connections and collaborations across institutions: Universities, government and nongovernmental organizations, and private industry.
- Broker: The University as an "honest intermediary" that brings cutting edge scientific information to solve issues and develops consensus based solutions with organizations.
- Develop: Nurture faculty and the next generation of student trainees that want to reach "beyond the ivory tower" and create interdisciplinary-solutions to large-scale and long-term problems related to water sustainability.
- Showcase: Partnerships and models that work AND document those that need improvements.
Our core approaches include:
- Developing consensus-based solutions by creating and promoting partnerships across institutions (universities, government and non-governmental organizations, and private industry) that solve water resource management issues,
- Acting as an "honest intermediary" where information is transferred across institutions, promoting environmentally sustainable and economically favorable strategies for managing water resources,
- Nurturing the next generation of problem solvers that want to reach "beyond the ivory tower" to foster collaborative approaches to conserving water resources, and
- Showcasing successful products, strategies, and models that facilitate solutions to water problems.
Partnerships
We collaborate by developing a place for interaction known as the Water Cooperative Unit. These collaborative efforts are important because we often "solve" issues without coordinating resources and without having common goals. Our goal is to create a water cooperative unit at the University to facilitate interactions agency representatives convene to share knowledge, resources, and develop and implement scientific solutions to tackle problems to achieve "win-win" results.