The School is proud to welcome Dr Patrick M. Reed from Cornell University, USA, to give a talk on, “Reducing regional water supply vulnerabilities and multi-city robustness conflicts when confronting a deeply uncertain future”.

Dr Reed will be speaking on research that involved engagement with water utilities in North Carolina, to examine a multi-stakeholder Many-Objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM) framework to better account for deeply uncertain factors when identifying cooperative management strategies. Emerging water scarcity concerns in south-eastern US are associated with several deeply uncertain factors, including rapid population growth, limited coordination across adjacent municipalities and increasing risk of sustained regional droughts. Managing uncertainties requires that water utilities identify regionally coordinated, scarcity-mitigating strategies that trigger the appropriate actions needed to avoid water shortages and financial instabilities.