Tuesday, March 21, 2023 12:30 PM-1:30 PM
Towards Holistic, Sustainable and Inclusive Management of Water and Environmental Systems

Abstract: Our climate, waters and environments are changing in a deeply uncertain manner due to the compounding effects from a range of natural and human drivers. Coping with these changes is a wicked problem, as natural, engineered and social systems are interwoven in complex, time-varying ways and are interdependent through feedback mechanisms that are often hard to quantify and predict. Such interdependencies challenge current science-policy paradigms as they result in cascading or undesired spinoff effects that are mostly ignored in traditional engineering approaches. Motivated by these challenges, this talk will provide an overview of some recent advances and future outlook for ‘integrated modelling’ to enable improved flood risk management, sustainable water supply, and resilience building is socio-environmental systems. A central argument is that both research and practice around water resources and environment are about to see dramatic shifts as a result of the boom in computational power, ‘big data’ sources, sensing technologies and artificial intelligence. These technologies, however, need to be embraced with a transdisciplinary view augmented with broad participation of community stakeholders including indigenous peoples to ensure that the best available science will respond to societal needs of the current generation and those to come.

Biography: Saman Razavi is a civil engineer by training who has been navigating an identity crisis after realizing his brain was wired to see only part of the “water problem”. After serving on the faculty at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada since 2014, he now works with the Australian National University's Institute for Water Futures. Saman tries to align his research work at the science-policy interface, bridging hydrological modelling and prediction of flood and drought events to integrated management of water and environmental systems and decision and policy making. In his free time, he develops methods based on systems and data sciences, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis, and machine learning. For example, He is the lead developer of VARS-Tool, which is a toolbox for sensitivity and uncertainty analysis (https://vars-tool.com/). His research has informed decisions around irrigation expansion, wetland drainage, and environmental and cultural flows across the Saskatchewan River Basin.