Invited talk WOTR, India

I have been invited by WOTR (Watershed Organization Trust) to the „Consultation on Climate Adaptation & Services for Water, Food, & Health Security“ conference in Pune, India to give a talk on numerical modeling of fractured aquifers. The team of WOTR has been actively involved for many years (decades) to introduce concepts such as participatory watershed development, efficient water management and eco-systems restoration with the help of farmers in rural regions of India.

The conference was a great blend of political views and concepts, economic considerations, adaption of irrigation methods and climate-change induced problems and solutions. Interestingly the field of „water management“ is often dominated by purely hydrological considerations, i.e. surface water management, despite the fact that vanishing water resources and/or little precipitation nearly always lead to tapping of groundwater resources which are inevitably linked to aquifer and hence recharge dynamics.

Bringing together communities from different research fields is a challenging task. It often means to simplify well-established concepts of each field in order to create suitable interfaces. Paired with the rigorous education most scientists experience in partially quite constrained fields, this requires to step back at times and reconsider the importance of dominating processes within each field.