SCELG celebrates World Water Day
SCELG celebrates World Water Day by preparing for a high-level visit from Prof Ricardo Hirata, Full Professor at the University of São Paulo and Vice-Director at CEPAS|USP (Groundwater Research Center of the University of Sao Paulo), who will be visiting the University of Strathclyde from 27 to 31 March 2017. Prof Hirata and Dr Sindico, Co-Director of the Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and Governance, will be contributing to an event on water in Latin America organised in collaboration with the Glasgow Latin American Research Network (GLARN) on Tuesday 28 March. They will also be visiting colleagues at the BGS (British Geological Survey) and Scottish Government in Edinburgh. These activities and meetings will take SCELG’s work on water a step further exploring new possibilities in collaboration with key partners such as USP in Brazil.
Freshwater is one of the 12 areas in which SCELG operates and it is also an area that features an incubator on transboundary aquifers. Researchers in SCELG working on water are very active with Stephanie Hawkins collaborating with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) on transboundary groundwater management and gender in the context of the Ramotswa Aquifer in Southern Africa. Renee Martin-Nagle, meanwhile, has been very active presenting on water and trade aspects at a leading academic event organised by Texas A&M University and will soon be talking about offshore aquifers in a multidisciplinary event on the topic and will be participating at the forthcoming XVI World Water Congress in Cancun. For the 2017 Jessup International Moot Court, the International Law Students Association featured a dispute on a transboundary aquifer in the compromis and invited Renee Martin-Nagle to deliver a presentation on transboundary aquifer governance which is available online. Dr Francesco Sindico continues to collaborate with UNESCO-IHP, one of our global partners, in the framework of his work on transboundary aquifers with capacity building activities in Central America and Southern Africa. Former SCELG Visiting Researcher Dr Laura Movilla, currently Lecturer at the University of Vigo in Spain, continues to collaborate with SCCELG members on joint papers. Water is also an area of interest of the BENELEX project, led by SCELG Co-Director Prof Elisa Morgera. Finally, SCELG affiliate member Prof Robert Kalin leads a major project funded by the Scottish Government Climate Justice Fund on groundwater science and policy in Malawi.
True to its commitment to multidisciplinarity, SCELG collaborates closely with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering when it comes to water related research and teaching. Dr Francesco Sindico co-convenes with Prof Robert Kalin a class on Global Water Policy, taken both by MSC and LLM students, and a number of PhD projects are supervised jointly between SCELG and Engineering. SCELG water-related research also informs the LLM in Global Environmental Law and Governance.
World Water Day reminds us of the urgent need to address global water problems. SCELG’s work, and its collaboration with global partners, contributes to such an endeavour exploring the role of law and governance in securing global water security and promoting transboundary water cooperation.
