About
36
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Introduction
Assistant Professor at University of Twente's Multidisciplinary Water Management group, my research interest lies in understanding humanity's water footprint in its various environmental, societal, and economic contexts. From modeling global water consumption, assessing local water scarcity, developing analytical trade-off and synergy frameworks, or exploring policy options, my interest is broad and I'm always open for potential collaborative projects. Just reach out, I usually respond quickly.
Additional affiliations
April 2019 - July 2019
Education
April 2015 - March 2019
Publications
Publications (36)
The water footprint of a crop (WF) is a common metric for assessing agricultural water consumption and productivity. To provide an update and methodological enhancement of existing WF datasets, we apply a global process-based crop model to quantify consumptive WFs of 175 individual crops at a 5 arcminute resolution over the 1990–2019 period. This m...
Livestock production is a major source of pharmaceutical emissions to the environment. The current scientific discourse focusses on measuring and modelling emissions as well as assessing their risks. While several studies evidence the severity of pharmaceutical pollution resulting from livestock farming, differences in pollution between livestock t...
Farms are not homogeneous. Smaller farms generally have different planted crops, yields, agricultural inputs, and irrigation applications compared to larger farms. However, gridded farm-size-specific data that are moreover crop specific, are currently lacking. This obscures our understanding of differences between small-scale and large-scale farms,...
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nation's Agenda 2030 are formulated to promote the development of integrated, multisectoral policies that explicitly consider linkages across SDGs. Although multiple recent studies have tried to identify linkages across SDGs, the role of contextual factors in identifying SDG linkages is neither...
Farms are not homogeneous. Smaller farms generally have different planted crops, yields, agricultural input, and irrigations compared to larger farms. Mapping farm size could facilitate studies to quantify how water availability and climate change affect small and large farms respectively. Given the lack of gridded farm-size specific data, this stu...
Crop water productivity is a key element of water and food security in the world and can be quantified by the water footprint (WF). Previous studies have looked at the spatially explicit distribution of crop WFs, but little is known about their temporal dynamics. Here, we present AquaCrop-Earth@lternatives (ACEA), a new process-based global gridded...
In a recent editorial in the journal Nature Sustainability , the editors raised the concern that journal submissions on water studies appear too similar. The gist of the editorial: “too many publications and not enough ideas.” In this response, we contest this notion, and point to the numerous new ideas that result from taking a broader view of the...
This chapter describes how to assess and reduce food systems’ pressure on global freshwater resources through the Water Footprint Assessment framework. First, we describe how to model the green and blue water footprint of growing a crop according to recent advances in the field of study. Second, we summarize methods to assess the environmental sust...
On 18 November 2019, the life of Arjen Y [...]
Shared groundwater resources between Mexico and the United States are facing unprecedented stressors. We reflect on how to improve water security for groundwater systems in the border region. Our reflection begins with the state of groundwater knowledge, and the challenges groundwater resources face from a physical, societal and institutional persp...
Crop water productivity is a key element of water and food security in the world and can be quantified by the water footprint (WF). Previous studies have looked at the spatially explicit distribution of crop WFs but little is known about the temporal dynamics. We develop a new global gridded crop model – AquaCrop-Earth@lternatives (ACEA) – that can...
Water pollution by veterinary antibiotics (VAs) resulting from livestock production is associated with severe environmental and human health risks. While upward trends in global animal product consumption signal that these risks might exacerbate toward the future, VA related water pollution is currently insufficiently understood. To increase this u...
Infrastructure systems are inextricably tied to society by providing a variety of vital services. These systems play a fundamental role in reducing the vulnerability of communities and increasing their resilience to natural and human-induced hazards. While various definitions of resilience for infrastructure systems exist, analyzing the resilience...
Resilience thinking is increasingly promoted to address some of the grand challenges of the 21st century: providing water, energy, and food to all, while staying within the limits of the Earth system that is undergoing (climate) change. Concurrently, a partially overlapping body of literature on the water–energy–food (WEF) nexus has emerged through...
Water shortages pose significant threats to local water security and food production around the world. Water managers have resorted to various water resources planning measures to overcome these challenges. For the first time and for a case study in Iran, we provide a comparative analysis of two such measures: physical and virtual inter-basin water...
Environmental contamination with pharmaceuticals is widespread, inducing risks to both human health and the environment. This paper explores potential societal solutions to human and veterinary pharmaceuticals in the aquatic environment. To this end, we adopt transition research’s multi-level perspective framework, which allows us to understand the...
Availability of sufficient and clean freshwater has become a growing constraint to sustainable agricultural development in many countries. We explore two pathways that hold the potential to reduce water consumption and pollution related to cereal production in Iran: reducing food waste and changing cropping patterns. Hereto, we first evaluated the...
Abstract. Infrastructure systems are inextricably tied to society by providing a variety of vital services. These systems play a fundamental role in reducing the vulnerability of communities and increasing their resilience to natural and human-induced hazards. While diverse definitions of the resilience engineering concept exist for the infrastruct...
Widespread water scarcity, water pollution, and depletion of freshwater resources are among the grand environmental challenges of the 21st century related to water. Central to these challenges is the fact that humanity uses too much water. But what are we using all that water for? The water footprint concept can help answer this question, and more....
Plain Language Summary
Around the world, people are using too much water from rivers, lakes, and streams. As a result, rivers run dry, lake levels drop, and fish and other animals and plants that depend on freshwater are being harmed. We therefore need to strike a better balance between how much water we use for ourselves and how much water we leav...
This report explores the complex issue of water scarcity in agriculture, particularly focusing on irrigation practices in the European Union (EU). It examines the role of two key EU policies: the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). While these policies guide water use in agriculture, they are not operationally...
This report presents the methodology that underlies GGGI’s Green Growth Index, which measures the performance of 115 countries in four green growth dimensions: (1) efficient and sustainable resource use, (2) natural capital protection, (3) green economic opportunities, and (4) social inclusion. The Green Growth Index and its dimensions draw on 36 i...
Energy security for the EU is a priority of the European Commission. Although both blue and green water resources are increasingly scarce, the EU currently does not explicitly account for water resource use in its energy related policies. Here we quantify the freshwater resources required to produce the different energy sources in the EU, by means...
Significance
Precipitation over land partitions into runoff via surface water and groundwater (blue water) and evapotranspiration (green water). We expand the traditional debate on water scarcity, which solely focuses on blue water, by assessing green water scarcity. The current debate on water scarcity is heavily skewed, since it leaves unnoticed...
Urban water security is a major concern in the context of urbanization and climate change. Water security goes beyond having good infrastructure or good governance. Systems thinking can help in understanding the mechanisms that influence the long-term water security of a city. Therefore, we developed a dashboard of 56 indicators based on the pressu...
The formulation of water footprint (WF) benchmarks in crop production – i.e. identifying reference levels of reasonable amounts of water consumption and pollution per tonne of crop produced – has been suggested as a promising strategy to counter inefficient water use and pollution. The current study is the first to show how setting WF benchmarks ma...
Although corporate social responsibility in general and corporate water stewardship specifically are of increasing concern to businesses, investors are lagging behind in fostering water sustainable investment practices – despite the large impact their investment decisions have on the state and shape of tomorrow's water resources. This paper is the...
For centuries, humans have resorted to building dams to gain control over freshwater available for human consumption. Although dams and their reservoirs have made many important contributions to human development, they receive negative attention as well, because of the large amounts of water they can consume through evaporation. We estimate the blu...
In deciding what crops to grow, farmers will look at, among other things, the economicallymost productive use of the water and land resources that they have access to. However, optimizingwater and land use at the farm level may result in total water and land footprints at the catchmentlevel that are in conflict with sustainable resource use. This s...
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 underlines the importance of Science and Technology (S&T) and S&T networks for effective disaster risk reduction (DRR). The knowledge of existing S&T networks and their exact role in DRR, however, is limited. This opinion piece initiates a discussion on the role of S&T networks in the imple...
This study presents the state-of-the-art understanding of the data-scarce and hydrogeologically complex groundwater system of Lake Naivasha, Kenya, with the particular aim of exploring the influence groundwater abstractions have on Lake Naivasha's water level. We developed multiple alternative but plausible parameterizations for a MODFLOW groundwat...
This study discusses the effects of water abstractions from two alternative sources on the available water volume around Lake Naivasha, Kenya: the lake itself and a connected aquifer. An estimation of the water abstraction pattern for the period 1999–2010 is made and its effect on the available water volume in Lake Naivasha and its connected aquife...