Inventive forecasting tools for adapting water quality management to a new climate (inventWater)

Long-term climate change, extreme events, and seasonal variations in weather have profound impacts on water quality of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. This implies a pressing need for tools anticipating the impacts of these environmental changes, and enabling effective water management that safeguards the ecosystem goods and services freshwaters provide. The increasing availability of new meteorological data products and advances in modelling tools now mean that it is possible for the first time to produce reliable forecasts for lake and river water quality on a regional and global scale, an unexploited potential in the water sector. Water managers will therefore profit from the education of a new generation of interdisciplinary trained professionals able to bridge fields such as data science, climate, hydrology, and freshwater ecology, who at the same time develop the necessary skills to translate knowledge and technical novelties into products useful for managers, policy-makers, and the general public.

The primary objective of inventWater is to organize a platform providing cutting edge cross disciplinary education of tomorrow's water experts. The core activity is the training program, focused on the development and real-world application of inventive water quality forecasting tools across a range of time-scales, to support fast and reliable decision making as well as long-term adaptation policies. inventWater will bring water quality forecasting to the forefront of the scientific disciplines supporting water managers and policy-makers to design measures for adaptation to a new climate. The composition of the network and the multidisciplinary of the PhD projects will make tools developed by inventWater fellows applicable to a wide range of pressing water quality issues, from local adaptation to increases of climatic extreme events, to supporting adaptation strategies to climate change and achievement of UN Sustainable Development Goals.