Edoardo Borgomeo

University of Cambridge | Cam · Department of Engineering

Risk-based water resources planning is based on the premise that water managers should invest up to the point where the marginal benefit of risk reduction equals the marginal cost of achieving that benefit. However, this cost-benefit approach may not guarantee robustness under uncertain future conditions, for instance under climatic changes. In thi...

Abstract Water scarcity in the Arab region is intensifying due to population growth, economic development, and the impacts of climate change. It is manifested in groundwater depletion, freshwater ecosystem degradation, deteriorating water quality, low levels of water storage per capita, and added pressures on transboundary water resources. High‐inc...

Agricultural water presents a set of challenges and opportunities for Arab countries as they work towards sustainable development. While water scarcity and variability in the region have been known and addressed for centuries, accelerating pressures from a range of drivers, including urbanisation, forced displacement and climate change, mean that w...

The world is not on track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6 on clean water and sanitation by 2030. We urge a rapid change of the economics, engineering and management frameworks that guided water policy and investments in the past in order to address the water challenges of our time.

This note discusses the challenges of water service delivery before, during and after protracted armed conflict, focusing on barriers that may impede successful transition from emergency to development interventions. The barriers are grouped according to three major contributing factors (three “C”s): culture (organizational goals and procedures), c...

Antibiotic residues in reservoirs threatens ecosystems and human health. Whereas numerous studies have been conducted on their occurrence and distribution, overall quantitative and comparative analysis of antibiotic contamination in reservoirs is challenging due to scattered data and scale differences. Here, we integrate antibiotic data from 520 sa...

The propagation of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in freshwater reservoirs threatens ecosystem security and human health, and has attracted increasing attention. A series of recent research articles on ARGs provides a unique opportunity for data-driven discoveries in this emerging field. Here, we mined data from a total of 290 samples from 60 r...

Natural hazards can impair socio-economic development and disproportionately affect the poorest and most vulnerable. While global and regional studies have quantified population exposure to various natural hazards, they have so far ignored exposure to geomorphic hazards, such as coastal and riverine erosion, land subsidence and siltation of waterbo...

How should the world deal with the problem of insufficient water infrastructure financing? Here we attempt to answer this question in the context of Asia. We estimate investment needs in water infrastructure to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals to be in the range of US$120–330 billion/year until 2030, compared with current inve...

Increasing flood risk, salinization and waterlogging threaten the lives and livelihoods of more than 35 million people in Bangladesh’s coastal zone. While planning models have long been used to inform investments in water infrastructure, they frequently overlook interacting risks, impacts on the poor and local context. We address this gap by develo...

Methods and models for water resource system simulation, risk analysis, and decision analysis provide powerful tools for dealing with the challenge of climate change in the water sector. These models enable learning about the complex behaviour of river basins, testing of alternative adaptation decisions, exploration of uncertainties, and navigation...

Microplastic contamination in reservoirs is receiving increasing attention worldwide. However, a holistic understanding of the occurrence, drivers, and potential risks of microplastics in reservoirs is lacking. Building on a systematic review and meta-analysis of 30 existing publications, we construct a global microplastic dataset consisting of 440...

Investments to rehabilitate and modernize irrigation systems as well as price subsidies to incentivize adoption of drip and sprinkler irrigation technologies are promoted to enhance agricultural productivity and sustainability of on-farm water use across India. We examine the effect of these two policies on farmer irrigation choices in surface irri...

More than 70% of large deltas are under threat from rising sea levels, subsidence and anthropogenic interferences, including the Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna (GBM) delta, the Earth’s largest and most populous delta system. The dynamic geomorphology of this delta is often overlooked in assessments of its vulnerability; consequently, development plans a...

Migration shapes the lives of those who move and transforms the geographies and economies of their points of departure and destinations alike. The water sector, and the availability of water itself, implicitly and explicitly shape migration flows. Ebb and Flow, Volume 1. Water, Migration, and Development presents new global evidence to advance our...

Water is more often a victim and casualty of conflict – rather than a primary source of conflict – in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Although there have been local instances of strife and displacement in response to water concerns, there is limited evidence that water risks cause large-scale forced displacement or lead directly to conflic...

Reservoirs account for about 10% of the freshwater stored in lakes worldwide. These reservoirs are home to ‘reservoir ecosystems’, that is, the aquatic and non-aquatic interactive ecosystems associated with artificial lakes where water is stored, typically behind a dam, for human purposes. While reservoir ecosystems provide various ecosystem servic...

The importance of green water (moisture from rain stored in soils) for global food and water security is widely recognized, with process-based simulation models and field-level studies demonstrating its role in supporting rainfed agriculture. Despite this evidence, the relationship between green water anomalies and rainfed agriculture has not yet b...

While water security is widely regarded as an issue of global significance and concern, there is not yet a consensus on a methodology for evaluating it. The difficulty in operationalizing the concept comes from its various interpretations and characteristics at different spatial and temporal scales. In this paper, we generate a dashboard comprised...

Water security has emerged in the 21st century as a powerful construct to frame the water objectives and goals of human society and to support and guide local to global water policy and management. Water security can be described as the fundamental societal goal of water policy and management. This article reviews the concept of water security, exp...

We explore the triumvirate of resilience – ‘persistence’, ‘adaptability’ and ‘transformability’ – in the context of England’s water supply infrastructure system. Risk-based decision-making and simulation models are increasingly being used to guide water resource management in England. We argue that these approaches and tools are sufficient to analy...

In the 1960s the Harvard Water Programme promoted a multidisciplinary approach to water resources management, with computer programming to solve complex water allocation problems at its core. Although we are now in the twenty‐first century, the challenges that the Harvard Water Programme sought to address are still with us, even though our perspect...

Researchers and decision-makers lack a shared understanding of resilience, and practical applications in environmental resource management are rare. Here, we define social-ecological resilience as a property of social-ecological systems that includes at least three main characteristics — resistance, recovery and robustness (the ‘three Rs’). We defi...

Resilient water supplies in England need to be secured in the face of challenges of population growth, climate change and environmental sustainability. We propose a blueprint for water resources planning that uses system simulation modelling to estimate the frequency, duration and severity of water shortages at present and in the context of future...

This paper discusses how epistemic uncertainties are considered in a number of different natural hazard areas including floods, landslides and debris flows, dam safety, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic ash clouds and pyroclastic flows, and wind storms. In each case it is common practice to treat most uncertainties in the form of aleatory p...

Part 1 of this paper has discussed the uncertainties arising from gaps in knowledge or limited understanding of the processes involved in different natural hazard areas. Such deficits may include uncertainties about frequencies, process representations, parameters, present and future boundary conditions, consequences and impacts, and the meaning of...

Part 1 of this paper has discussed the uncertainties arising from gaps in knowledge or limited understanding of the processes involved in different natural hazard areas. Such deficits may include uncertainties about frequencies, process representations, parameters, present and future boundary conditions, consequences and impacts, and the meaning of...

This paper discusses how epistemic uncertainties are currently considered in the most widely occurring natural hazard areas, including floods, landslides and debris flows, dam safety, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic ash clouds and pyroclastic flows, and wind storms. Our aim is to provide an overview of the types of epistemic uncertainty i...

Water, energy, and agriculture have been conventionally dealt with separately in investment planning. For each of these sectors, regulatory frameworks, organizations, and infrastructures have been put in place to address sector-specific challenges and demands. As the Middle East and North Africa works towards building a more sustainable future, a n...

This paper presents an analysis of the multi-sectoral and distributional economic impacts of rainfall shocks in the Awash river basin in Ethiopia. Using novel disaggregated data on crop production, we estimate the direct impacts of rainfall shocks on agriculture and then use a Computable General Equilibrium model to simulate how these rainfall shoc...

Water-related risks impact development opportunities and can trap communities in a downward spiral of economic decline. In this article, the dynamic relationship between water-related risks and economic outcomes for an embanked area in coastal Bangladesh is conceptualized. The interaction between flood events, salinity, deteriorating and poorly mai...

Humanity is facing unprecedented environmental, social and economic challenges. We ask what the role of the sustainability science community should be in tackling these challenges, focusing particularly on young scientists’ perspectives on the issue. On the basis of a questionnaire and a workshop with young scientists, we identify four major challe...

Losses from natural hazards, including geophysical and hydrometeorological hazards, have been increasing worldwide. This review focuses on the process by which scientific evidence about natural hazards is applied to support decision making. Decision analysis typically involves estimating the probability of extreme events; assessing the potential im...

London’s ability to remain a world-leading city in an increasingly globalised economy is dependent on it being an efficient, low-risk place to do business and a desirable place to live. However, increasing climate risk from flooding, overheating and water scarcity threatens this, creating the need for adaptation. An adaption pathway describes a str...

Choosing secure water resource management plans inevitably requires trade-offs between risks (for a variety of stakeholders), costs and other impacts. We have previously argued that water resources planning should focus upon metrics of risk of water restrictions, accompanied by extensive simulation- and scenario-based exploration of uncertainty. Ho...

This paper discusses how epistemic uncertainties are considered in a number of different natural hazard areas including floods, landslides and debris flows, dam safety, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, ash clouds, pyroclastic flows and wind storms. In each case it is common practice to treat most uncertainties in the form of aleatory probability di...

Socio-environmental certification uses evaluation criteria to promote the conservation of the natural environment and landscape connectivity, with the aim of constructing agricultural landscapes more suitable for biodiversity conservation. To test this, we examine whether socio-environmental certification of Brazilian coffee farms contributes to lo...

Uncertainties in natural hazard risk assessment are generally dominated by the sources arising from lack of knowledge or understanding of the processes involved. There is a lack of knowledge about frequencies, process representations, parameters, present and future boundary conditions, consequences and impacts, and the meaning of observations in ev...

Suppporting Information S1

Global climate models suggest an increase in evapotranspiration, changing storm tracks, and moisture delivery in many parts of the world, which are likely to cause more prolonged and severe drought, yet the weakness of climate models in modeling persistence of hydroclimatic variables and the uncertainties associated with regional climate projection...

The vulnerability of water supplies to shortage depends on the complex interplay between streamflow variability and the management and demands of the water system. Assessments of water supply vulnerability to potential changes in streamflow require methods capable of generating a wide range of possible streamflow sequences. This paper presents a me...

An 815-km2 area in Molise, central Italy, was used as a natural laboratory to characterise the lithological, topographic, and fluvial controls on the spatial distribution and frequency of active landslides in temperate climates. The study area is part of the central Apennines fold-and-thrust belt and is characterised by the presence of a tectonic m...

estudo avaliou a contribuição da certificação para a conservação da vegetação nativa no Brasil, na perspectiva de um instrumento voluntá-rio de incentivo para mudanças. Concluímos que a certificação superou a escala de piloto no país, tendo uma abrangência nacional, presente em diversos biomas e regiões. Por mais de uma década, tem sido implementad...

We present a risk-based approach for incorporating non-stationary probabilistic climate projections into long-term water resources planning. The proposed methodology uses non-stationary synthetic time series of future climates obtained via a stochastic weather generator based on the UK Climate Projections (UKCP09) to construct a probability distrib...

This paper presents a risk-based methodology for water planning under climate change. A risk-based methodology considers the probability and consequences of undesired outcomes in the future. In the context of water resources, we think of undesired outcomes as water shortages of different levels of severity. The probability of exceeding a target fre...

Synthesizing and testing bicomposite adsorbents for the removal of environmentally problematic oxy-anions is high on the agenda of research-led universities. Here we present a laboratory module successfully developed at Imperial College London that introduces the advanced undergraduate student in engineering (chemical, civil, earth) and science (ch...

The concept of water security implies concern about potentially harmful states of coupled human and natural water systems. Those harmful states may be associated with water scarcity (for humans and/or the environment), floods or harmful water quality. The theories and practices of risk analysis and risk management have been developed and elaborated...

I present here the reasons why I chose to pursue a University degree in Earth sciences. Although this topic might at first seem unrelated to geoethics, it is somehow connected to it. I will show how my decision to study Earth sciences was influenced by geoethical considerations, even though I did not consider them as such when I made my decision. M...

Il progetto SEE-GeoForm (Site Effects Evaluation - Geological Form: http://www.seegeoform.it) nasce con l’obiettivo di realizzare uno strumento semplice, potente e completo per la consultazione e la rappresentazione,tramite un WebGIS, di dati geologici, geomorfologici, geotecnici e geofisici relativi all’intero territorio italiano. In questo modo,...

This report was prepared by Mr Edoardo Borgomeo during the summer pause of Imperial College (London, UK) lectures. Mr Borgomeo have joined the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (Italian Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology) for an internship under the supervision of Dr. Giuseppe Di Capua and Prof Silvia Peppoloni. This internship wa...