About this Webinar:
Today, nearly a billion people in the world are food-insecure — without access to enough nutritious food to lead healthy and active lives. Many food-insecure people are also water-insecure, without enough readily available water to meet their needs. This webinar will introduce the overall challenge of ensuring sustainable global food and water security in the wake of population and income increases, a changing climate and the growing demand for water resources, with a special focus on practical ways to improve water use and management in agricultural and food systems. In this webinar we will touch on several subject areas that are central to water and food security, including:
- Closing water and agricultural productivity gaps
- Sustainable groundwater management and irrigated agriculture
- Drought management techniques
The webinar will also briefly describe the work of the Water for Food Institute and its mission to have a lasting and significant impact on achieving food security with less pressure on scarce water resources through scientific and policy research, education and communication.
Presenter:
Roberto Lenton is the Founding Executive Director and Robert B. Daugherty Chair, Water for Food Institute at the University of Nebraska, and Professor of Biological Systems Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A specialist in water resources and sustainable development with some 40 years of international experience in the field, Prof. Lenton earned a civil engineering degree from the University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the holder of an honorary L.L.D from the University of Dundee. Before joining the University of Nebraska, Prof. Lenton was the Chair of the Inspection Panel of the World Bank. Earlier, he was senior adviser at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, director of the Sustainable Energy and Environment Division of the United Nations Development Programme in New York, director general of the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka, and program officier in the Rural Poverty and Resources program of the Ford Foundation in New Delhi and New York. He has served as chair of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council and of the Technical Committee of the Global Water Partnership, and is a coauthor of Applied Water Resources Systems, a coeditor of Integrated Water Resources Management in Practice, and a lead author of Health, Dignity and Development: What Will it Take?, the final report of the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Water and Sanitation, which he co-chaired. He has also served as adjunct professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT.
