Stockholm & water

For the last two weeks I’ve been in Stockholm, attending the Stockholm World Water Week (SWWW), followed by a research visit hosted by the Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI). Both ‘events’ were a great opportunity to talk with many people about the topics I work and discuss about the particularities of the deltas where the research takes place.

At the SWWW, still, it is not easy to get immediately in touch with people working on or interested in similar topics – the seize of the conference (over 3000 people participated) and the broadness of the theme (water and development) made it very likely that you would connect with people working on totally different dimensions of water. It required some targeted, on-site researching and contacting. 

So, I was happy that the week after the event was dedicated to planned and more focused discussions with ‘matching’ organizations and individuals when it comes to research topics. Besides SEI you can think about organizations such as the Global Water Partnership, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and the Stockholm International Water Institute.

Today I gave a presentation at SEI about controlled flooding in deltas and discussed with the participants about how to conceptualize deltas, and how controlled flooding (and associated sedimentation processes) might contribute to building long term delta resilience – not only for humans inhabiting the delta, but also for the delta as a dynamic ecosystem itself. You can find the slides of the presentation via Slideshare. The conclusion was that the paper, written by Jan and me, which includes all these kinds of issues, will find a large community interested to read it and to continue thinking about dealing with delta flood dynamics ;p!