Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Alumni Update 14
Support WSSS
Interested in supporting the WSSS program? You can now donate directly
online through the Giving to Tufts website.
{ }
For more information, visit www.tufts.edu/water/Giving_to_WSSS.html
One of our most exciting water diplomacy initiatives, led by visiting scholar
Annette Huber-Lee, is titled, “Collaborating Versus Competing for Survival: Water Tim Griffin
and Livelihood Security in the Middle East.” Dr. Huber-Lee’s joint research with
economist Franklin Fischer at MIT has shown that three-way cooperative water
management among Jordan, Palestine and Israel would generate enormous monetary
benefits for all; however, it takes a university to figure out how to implement this
cooperative strategy. Participants in this effort include faculty from Fletcher,
Engineering, Biology, Anthropology, Economics, Nutrition, and Biomedical Sciences,
as well as colleagues from the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Tufts
Positive Deviance Institute.
Second-year WSSS students are charged with organizing our annual symposium.
This year’s symposium, “Water in 2050: The Infrastructure to Get There,” took
place on April 1st. With keynote lectures by Gene Stakhiv, the senior international Rusty
water advisor for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Dan Sheer, the founder Russell
and president of Hydrologics, the symposium advanced our understanding of a
central challenge of water management and environmental policy. The symposium
featured three panels with faculty from Harvard, MIT, Tufts, and the University of
Massachusetts, as well as colleagues from Massachusetts Water Resources Authority
(MWRA), Geosyntec, the Cadmus Group and Oxfam International. (continued on page 4)
Annual Newsletter: May 2011 Page 3
Graduate students from Tufts, Harvard and Boston College had an opportunity to present their
research at a lunchtime poster session and network with representatives from symposium
sponsors Geosyntec, CDM, AECOM, the Cadmus Group, and the Stockholm Environment Institute
(SEI).
In another WSSS initiative, newly appointed Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering
Elena Naumova is leading a group of faculty from the Schools of Engineering and Medicine and
colleagues from the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of the Hydrologic Sciences
(CUAHSI) in an effort to develop a framework for securing funding for training grants in the area of
water and health.
WSSS students in the Practicum Track are working on a stormwater management initiative with
the Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA), a regional advocacy group, on the Alewife
River sub-watershed adjacent to the Medford campus. This project was developed through a
Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis (PIPA) exercise in the WSSS course “Integrated Water
Resources Management” taught by Dr. Huber-Lee in fall 2010. PIPA is a relatively young approach
that draws from program theory evaluation, social network analysis and research to facilitate
organizational development and foster innovation.
“It Takes a
University”
You’ll find descriptions of these and many other exciting developments in this newsletter.
As we grow, the vision and mission of the WSSS program remains unchanged: We continue
to educate and nurture Tufts graduate students to be attentive to the issues affecting water
resources management and to create a thriving intellectual community dedicated to addressing
interdisciplinary water issues.
In closing, we wish to give a special thanks to John Foster, former CEO of Malcolm Pirnie and a
Tufts alumnus (CEE ’52), for his the long-term and continuing generosity. Along with the Tufts
administration, John is the single biggest supporter of our WSSS programs.
You taught a course in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) at Tufts last fall, and
are now teaching a course in Water and Environmental Resource Systems Analysis. Why did you
choose to teach those courses? What do you enjoy most about teaching them?
I really enjoy teaching both of them partly because they’re so challenging. I’m drawn to complex
problems, and using IWRM and systems analysis tools to try to unravel some of that complexity.
These are messy problems; in the IWRM course, we are really focused on tools that help integrate
the quantitative with the qualitative.
I love teaching partly because I’ve learned so much in the process. The thrill of watching the
students make progress over the course of the semester in appreciating the complexity of these
problems, being exposed to problems from all over the world, and then seeing where they take all
of that. It’s been a really gratifying experience.
(continued on page 6)
You’ve shown that cooperative water resource management among the countries of Israel,
Palestine and Jordan would lead to enormous benefits for all three countries. What will it take
to make this happen? How can your research be used to facilitate cooperation in the Middle
East?
The economic value for Israel, Palestine and Jordan to collaborate or coordinate or cooperate is
on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars per year -- so there’s no obstacle from an economic
standpoint. What are the obstacles? One that comes to mind is trust. You can’t have collaboration
or coordination or cooperation without a foundation of trust. How do you go about building trust?
As Richard Vogel puts it, “It takes a university.” My hope would be to
create a true interdisciplinary program of research at Tufts where we “In the end, it’s
would have faculty and students working jointly to try to address these not going to be
issues. It would be a joint Water Economics Project and Tufts University one single thing;
[effort] and then, ideally, it would join with universities in the Middle it really does take
East. For example, the Arava Institute in Israel is unique in that it has the university.”
Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli faculty and students. Partnership at
the university level is, in some form, a trust-building activity.
We’ve put together an internal proposal at Tufts that would use concepts from the Positive
Deviance Initiative. The idea is to find a deviant (in a positive way) example of a behavior,
and then see how you can replicate it. For example, in border towns that are typically West
Bank and Israel – would there be some degree of cooperation [between the two parts of these
communities]? Are there examples at the national scale where we see cooperation working?
What will be the issue that puts water on the forefront of people’s minds? Climate change?
The increase in food prices may be more of a trigger in the short term than climate change. Water
is connected to energy via biofuels; by growing more biofuels, we’re growing less food, and that’s
having ripple effects. In Tunisia and Egypt, one of the underlying causes of discontent may have
been high food prices, though it’s hard to place attribution.
Bahamas project, Levental developed a community based water monitoring program for the
regional council of Bethlehem.
“After doing calculations, modeling, and creating a water budget, we learned that, contrary to
popular belief, only a small percentage of the water coming out of the Battir spring is groundwater.
Most of the water is coming from the black- and graywater leaching through the limestone from
residents’ boreholes, so the levels of pathogens in the spring are really high,” he says.
In his final report, The Battir Spring: The Road to a Safe Water Resource (available at www.tufts.
edu/water/pdf/SimchaLevental_Paper.pdf ), Levental details the extent of human influence on the
spring and offers precautions for future development of the area.
“A localized solution,” he concludes, “doesn’t solve the problem.” Rather, regional cooperation is the
key to a successful, healthy water system.
But Tufts’ Water Diplomacy efforts will extend beyond the IGERT program. This June, Tufts will
team up with Harvard and MIT to host a Water Diplomacy Workshop to be held at Tufts. “You think
and then you do,” Islam says. “The IGERT is the thinking and the Water Diplomacy Workshop is the
doing.” The goal of the workshop is to “train the trainers” to think water as a flexible resource and
synthesize explicit and tacit information to create actionable knowledge. Co-taught with Professor
Lawrence Susskind of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard University and MIT, this workshop is
the first of its kind. Framing water science, policy, and politics as networks of relationships allows
them to be managed through mutual gains negotiations. In this inaugural venture, participants
will spend five days participating in interactive lectures, problem-solving clinics, and role-play
simulations in order to integrate learning into practice.
“In 20 years, we will create The overwhelming response – the workshop has already
several thousand reflective received many more applications than the 35 available
spaces – is a testament to the need for this type of
water professionals who’ll
knowledge and training. Participants will be mid-to
think like this. We are in the senior-level water professionals from around the globe.
game of changing the way we Representatives from the United States, Israel, Palestine,
think about water.” Mexico, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Peru, Pakistan and Russia
have already committed to attending. Islam takes the
long view, imagining each participant teaching 20 others: “In 20 years, we will create several
thousand reflective water professionals who’ll think like this. We are in the game of changing the
way we think about water.”
Shafiqul (“Shafik”) Islam is the first Bernard M. Gordon Senior Faculty Fellow in Engineering and
Professor of Water Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He
is the Director of the Water Diplomacy Program at Tufts University that involves over twenty faculty
and fifteen national and international partners and is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Islam’s interdisciplinary research and educational interests are to understand, characterize,
measure, and model water issues ranging from climate to cholera to water diplomacy with a focus on
scale issues and remote sensing. His research group, WE REASoN, integrates theory and practice to
create actionable knowledge.
In November 2010, WSSS graduate Racey Bingham F’07, N’07 spoke with TIE intern Libby Mahaffy G’11 from the
Central African Republic (CAR), where she’s living and doing development work on a contract with the World Bank.
What have you been up to since graduating from Tufts and finishing the WSSS program?
Two years ago, I realized that the more I advanced in my career in development, the farther away I
got from the farmers and producers that I loved working with. I’m not somebody who likes to sit in
the office all day long – I was really getting frustrated – so when my job finished I decided to take a
break and try actually farming myself. I moved to the town in upstate New York where my dad and
step-mother had retired to and started working for a local farm called Essex Farm. I loved it, and
decided to try and juggle farming for 8 months of the year and work in Africa doing international
development work during the winters when there’s less activity on the farm. I may want to come
back to work full-time in Africa, so I’m keeping my international development resume current as a
mid-level consultant.
How are you using what you
learned in WSSS in your current
job?
My first winter in CAR (2009-
2010), I worked on an urban
water and sanitation project that
dealt with drainage and water
systems. I definitely used my
WSSS knowledge working on
that project in terms of water
systems and GIS. There was a
lot of flooding here in Bangui
in 2009, and I was researching
flood risk and preparedness, so
it helped to have a basic sense of
the engineering and the different
kinds of water systems.
Racey Bingham on the New York farm, spring 2011
I was more able to use my WSSS background in Mali, where I worked for two years after Tufts on
a large-scale irrigation project. Here (in CAR) I’m more focused on agriculture products, and CAR
has abundant rainfall, so it’s all rain-fed agriculture. There is no lack of water, but there is a lack of
infrastructure to ensure the right quantities of water consistently over time. Both the World Bank
and the International Fund for Agricultural Development are preparing projects in CAR that are
likely to fund small dams and infrastructure improvements to support to small rural farmers.
WSSS helped me to look at agricultural systems from a broader perspective, both understanding
and keeping in mind the engineering side of these systems: How do you grow the food? What’s the
Water: Systems, Science and Society Page 14
water system? Is there a way to better manage the rainfall and waste? I look at problems from a
very holistic perspective even though I am dealing just with agriculture projects right now.
WSSS Fellowships provide financial support to students to encourage and foster interdisciplinary water-related
research; to provide financial support to WSSS students for research that will produce scholarship; and to increase
participation of WSSS faculty in research projects related to WSSS objectives.
Amanda Beal and Ellen Parry Tyler N’11: “By Land and By Sea: Connecting Maine’s
Farming and Fishing Communities”
Building off shared input from farmers, fishermen and
representative organizations throughout the state of
Maine, we presented results from a series of statewide
forums we convened in early 2010. By Land and By
Sea project stakeholders, including representatives of
state agencies, organizations and community members
brainstormed cross-cutting challenges and formed a
sub-committee to draft and distribute a policy brief to
gubernatorial candidates. This document, “Maine Food
Security, Jobs and the Environment,” outlined a list of
action steps and recommendations to the next governor.
Member organizations of the Eat Local Foods Coalition
also met with candidates to discuss the By Land and By Sea project. Both of these documents can
be found at: http://www.eatmainefoods.org/forum/topics/elfc-releases-by-land-by-sea
John Parker F’12, N’12: “The Adoption and Diffusion of Soil and Water Management
Innovations: A Case Study of the Quesungual Slash-and-Mulch Agroforestry System”
With rising food demand and mounting constraints on
water resources and arable land, how can the resilience
of agricultural systems be strengthened to produce
more food while using less water under increasingly
uncertain conditions? Recent studies have highlighted
the potential to achieve significant gains in crop yields
and water productivity through improved soil moisture
or “green water” management. Achieving these gains
requires the widespread adoption of on-farm soil and
water management innovations by smallholder farmers,
which has been limited in many of the regions where
the greatest potential lies. My research examines the
Quesungal Slash-and-Mulch Agroforestry System in southwestern Honduras to better understand
the factors that influence farmer adoption of soil and water management innovations and the
determinants of how local innovations are catalyzed and scaled-out to achieve large-scale impact.
My preliminary results indicate that secure land tenure, participation in community groups and
collective action by heterogeneous actors significantly influence the rate of generation, adoption
and diffusion of soil and water management innovations among smallholder farmers.
Water: Systems, Science and Society Page 16
Jeff Cegan E’11: “Resilient Water Resource Systems: Managing Surprise”
Environmental surprises are bound to occur. Surprise is induced by
uncertainty and chaos in environmental systems and exacerbated
by anthropogenic attempts to gain control over these systems. In
my thesis, I review the concept of surprise and its role in ecosystem
management and financial markets. In particular, I focus on the
connection between surprise and resiliency. I explore methods in
which integrated adaptive management and critical thinking embrace
uncertainty and absorb surprise impacts, and I explain how regional
preparedness is critical to mitigate adverse effects of climate-induced
surprises. Lastly, I review the quantification of surprise and its applications to water resource
management, while stressing the importance of integrating non-quantifiable notions of surprise
into decision-making for a more sustainable approach to management.
Gogi Grewal G’11, N’11: “Assessing the Short-Term Impact of School-Based Safe Water
Points on Childhood Diarrheal Disease and School Attendance in Somali Region, Ethiopia”
My interest in water is primarily related to how access to safe
and sufficient quantities of it intersects with health in developing
countries where infrastructure tends to be lacking, and determining
what technologies are best-suited to particular settings. With
the help of funding from the WSSS Fellowship, I was able to
spend a semester in Ethiopia researching barriers to the use and
sustainability of school-based water and sanitation facilities. This
involved a mixture of qualitative methods to examine experiences
with use and maintenance of different types of water points, ranging
from roof water catchments to pipe extensions from municipal
supplies. Speaking with students, schools staff, and government health and water officials from 6
different regions of Ethiopia and examining drinking, handwashing and latrine facilities first-hand
was a valuable insight into what is and is not working in schools.
Lauren Caputo E’11: “Use of a Decision Support System for Stormwater Management
Planning”
My research project examines stormwater management strategies
under a changing climate. With the acceptance that precipitation
patterns change over time comes the reality that the “static design
problem” no longer holds. How should we design stormwater
management practices under a dynamic climate? Or more
importantly, how should we retrofit stormwater management systems
in urban areas that are already prone to flooding or have combined
sewer overflows? I use the combined sewer system in Somerville, Massachusetts as a case study to
explore the possibilities of LID control under different climate scenarios using EPA’s SWMM software.
Karen Claire Kosinski E’11: “Diagnostic Test Accuracy and Spatial Heterogeneity of
Urinary Schistosomiasis in the Eastern Region, Ghana”
My research focuses on the primary prevention of infections and
diseases related to water, sanitation, and hygiene. Specifically,
I work with the organism Schistosoma haematobium and
conduct fieldwork in five communities in Ghana, West Africa.
S. haematobium is transmitted via skin contact with surface
water contaminated with human waste. In 2008 and 2009,
my research team and I designed and constructed a water
recreation area to reduce contact with contaminated water in
one of our partnering communities, Adasawase. School-aged children are particularly at risk of
infection. In 2010, we collected data about the efficacy of the structure in preventing reinfection
with S. haematobium. Currently, we are analyzing the data via a logistic regression model.
Civil and Environmental Engineering Master’s candidate and WSSS student Eric Vaughan E’11 completed WSSS-funded
research on agricultural demand for water in the West Bank in summer 2010.
I just submitted a conference paper based on this research for the ASCE World Environmental
and Water Resources Congress, 2011. My research focuses on characterizing uncertainty in the
agricultural demand for water in the West Bank, Palestine. Understanding demand for water is a
critical first step in guiding socially beneficial water allocations, infrastructure development, and
cooperation between Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and even Lebanon and Syria.
I’m not a research or teaching assistant here at Tufts, which means my research is unfunded. There
are two aspects to research: advancing the techniques and characterization of a place. In order to
do the second part effectively, you really have to go directly to the field. I applied for and won a
WSSS research fellowship in order to do this fieldwork in the Middle East last summer. It wouldn’t
have been possible without WSSS financial support.
(continued on page 20)
Interdisciplinarity is critical to my research; it could not be done by a specialist from any one field.
My research committee includes Richard Vogel, who has a background in statistics, hydrology
and systems, Timothy Griffin, an agronomist, and Annette Huber-Lee, who has background in
economics, water resources management, and mathematical programming and understands
the context of our work in the Middle-East. Each committee member has made substantial and
necessary contributions to this work. There are so many problems that require this type of multi-
disciplinary approach and this is why WSSS is so important! As told to Libby Mahaffy G’11
Akanda, A.S., Jutla, A.S., Siddique, A.K., Alam, M., Sack, R., Huq, A., Colwell, R. and Islam, S. 2011. Hydroclimatic Influences on Seasonal and Spatial
Cholera Transmission Cycles: Implications for Public Health Intervention in the Bengal Delta, Water Resources Research (Paper in Press)
Akanda, A. S., Jutla, A.S. and Islam, S. 2009. Dual peak cholera transmission in Bengal Delta: A hydroclimatological explanation, Geophysical
Research Letters, 36, L19401, doi:10.1029/2009GL039312.
Akanda, A.S, Jutla, A.S., Eltahir, E. and Islam, S. 2011. Hydroepidemiology of Cholera Transmission in Bangladesh: A Spatially Explicit and
Seasonally Varying Cholera Prevalence Model. General Assembly of the EGU, Vienna, Austria, April 3-8. (Accepted)
Akanda, A. S., Jutla, A. S., Huq, A., Colwell, R. and Islam, S. 2010. From Fall to Spring, or Spring to Fall? Seasonal Cholera Transmission Cycles and
Implications for Climate Change. Proceedings of AGU, Fall Meeting 2010, San Francisco, CA. December 13-17.
Akanda, A.S., Jutla, A.S., and Islam, S. 2010. Climate Change, Hydrologic Extremes and Cholera Dynamics. Water, and Health: Where Science Meets
Policy, Chappel Hill, NC, October 25-26.
Akanda, A.S., Jutla, A.S., and Islam, S. 2010. Remote Sensing Based Forecasting of Cholera Outbreaks, Remote Sensing and Hydrology Symposium,
September 27-30, Jackson, Wyoming.
Akanda, A.S., Jutla, A.S., and Islam, S. 2009. Rivers as Corridors of Diarrheal Disease Transmission: Role of Coastal and Terrestrial
Hydroclimatology. Proceedings of the AGU Americas Meeting, Foz do Iguacu, Brazil. August 8-12.
Akanda, A. S., Jutla, A.S., and Islam, S. 2010. Hydrology, Climate and Human Health: a hydroclimatological approach to understand cholera
transmission in South Asia and sub Saharan Africa. Proceedings of the UNESCO Xth Kovacs Colloquium, Paris, France, July 3-4.
Akanda, A.S., Jutla, A.S., and Islam, S. 2010. Hydroclimatic Extremes and Cholera Dynamics in the 21st Century. Steve Burges Retirement
Symposium, University of Washington, Seattle, WA March 24-26
Akanda, A.S., Jutla, A.S., and Islam, S. 2009. Dual Peak Cholera transmission in South Asia: A Hydroclimatological explanation. Proceedings of the
AGU, San Francisco, CA, December 14-18.
Akanda, S., Jutla, A.S., and Islam, S. 2009. Climate Extremes and Infectious Diseases: Large Scale Hydroclimatic Controls in Forecasting Cholera
Epidemics. Research Day on Global Health and Infectious Disease, Tufts University, USA. October 5.
Akanda, A. S., Jutla, A. S., and Islam, S. 2009. Bimodal Explanation of Cholera in Bangladesh: A hydroclimatological explanation. General Assembly
of the EGU, Vienna, Austria, April 19-24.
Blankenship, Sara. “Georgia’s Red Clay: A Scientific and Regulatory Overview.” Perspectives on Georgia’s Environment. State Bar of Georgia
Environmental Law Section. Winter 2011. 8-15.
Cegan, Jeff. “Estimating Regions’ Relative Vulnerability to Climate Damages in the CRED Model”. Stockholm Environment Institute. Working Paper
WP-US-1103
Islam, S., Jutla, A. S., Akanda, A. 2011. Hydroepidemiology: A Synthesis of Micro- and Macro-Scale Processes For Predicting Cholera Outbreaks in
South Asia and Africa. NSF Ecology of Marine Infectious Disease Workshop, San Juan, PR, February 11-13.
Islam, S., Akanda, A. S., Jutla, A.S., Lin, C. and Gao, Y. 2009. AquaPedia: Building Intellectual Capacity through Shared Learning and Open Access
Platform to Resolve Water Conflicts. General Assembly of the EGU, Vienna, Austria, April 19-24.
Islam, S., Gao, Y. and Akanda, A.S. 2010. Water 2100: A synthesis of natural and societal domains to create actionable knowledge through
AquaPedia and water diplomacy Pp 193-197; Proceedings of the UNESCO Xth Kovacs Colloquium, Paris, France, July 3-4.
Islam, S., Jutla, A.S., Akanda, S. and Islam, S. 2009. Integrating Terrestrial Hydrology and Coastal Ecology: Understanding Cholera Dynamics using
Remote Sensing Data. Proceedings of the AGU, San Francisco, CA, December 14-18.
Jutla, A.S., Akanda, A.S. and Islam, S. 2010. Tracking Cholera in Coastal Regions using Satellite Observations. Journal of American Water Resources
Association. 46(4):651-662. doi: 10.1111/j.1752-1688.2010.00448.x.
Jutla, A.S., Akanda, A.S. and Islam, S. 2011. Tracking Cholera from Satellites: Space-Time variation of chlorophyll in Northern Bay of Bengal. (in
revision, Remote Sensing of Environment)