Urban Water Systems Working Group - Sustainable Water Future Programme

Antje Bruns

Co-Chair of the Urban Water Systems Working Group

Trained as geographer (PhD Kiel), Antje’s work examines political dimensions of environmental and resource governance. Her primary research for the past few years has been on environmental governance in coastal zones and coastal cities, whereby her theoretical interests span political ecology, environmental studies and debates over development and sustainability transformations. Currently Antje studies energy and water security aspects on a theoretical and empircal level. Energy and water are particularly suitable to study societal relations to nature and the governance plays in structuring these relations.

Antje is holding a full professorship for Sustainable Development and Governance at Trier University where she is head of the research project WaterPower.

Water Future Is Important To Me Because…

Water Future offers an exciting platform to critically engage with global water challenges and it is my personal ambition to foster socio-political aspects in water studies.

Peter Scales

Member of the Scientific Steering Committee and Co-Chair of the Urban Water Systems Working Group

Peter Scales is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Deputy Dean of the School of Engineering at the University of Melbourne. He is Director of the Particulate Fluids Processing Centre and has just completed a Directorship of the Joint Australia-China Research Centre on River Basin Management. He has seven years of industrial experience in particle and fluid processing as well as over twenty years experience in academia.

His research interests are in the area of process and systems optimization and productivity with an emphasis on systems involving fluid and slurry flow, particle flocculation and dispersion, and molecular and particle separations technologies including thickening, sedimentation and membrane filtration. The application space for his research is in water recycle to productive use, breaking the pollution cycle in waste-water processing, biomass dewatering, water re-use in mining and the competition for water between agriculture, mining, energy, cities and the environment. His current research is in the area of direct potable recycle of water, the water productivity of cities, algal cell dewatering for biofuels and the prediction of thickener and water re-cycle performance for the minerals industry.

Water Future is Important To Me Because…

Achieving Sustainable Development Goal six (water and sanitation) is one of the world’s biggest challenges. Bringing expertise from across the world to focus on integrated solutions is a great starting point to making a real difference. The majority of the effort for water and sanitation needs to focus on the significant trend towards urbanization in the world, including a lack of integrated water supply and sewage services for nearly half of the global population and the vulnerability of people to disease and social stigmas associated with inadequate services in this area.