Sustainable water

Our water-related research addresses pressing sustainable water challenges from local to global scales. Recent and on-going work includes:

• Techniques for understanding groundwater depletion and sustainability
• Mapping of global permeability and porosity, and modeling of continental-scale groundwater systems.
• Water/wastewater treatment and resource recovery process for both high-tech and low-resource environments
• Development and evaluation of humanitarian emergency water supply and sanitation technologies
• Invention of affordable sensors to detect trace metal pollutants in the field.

The faculty conducting sustainable water research in the department are Heather Buckley, (green engineering and chemistry) Caetano Dorea (environmental and public health engineering) and Tom Gleeson (groundwater science and sustainability). We are part of a broad research ecosystem with a number of other professors and research centers at UVic focusing on sustainable water: Oliver Brandes (POLIS Water Sustainability), Michelle Lee-Moore (Geography), Asit Mazumder (Biology), Terry Prowse (Geography/Environment Canada) and Caterina Valeo (Mechanical Engineering) as well as others in the Water and Climate Research Impacts Research Center and the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium.