Events

Lecture: river basin development

Professor Andrea Castelletti from the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) will give a lecture on Thursday, 12 September 2019 on "Six open challenges in river basin development: the role of ICT". The lecture starts at 2 pm at the Einstein Center Digital Future.

Abstract
Large storage systems play a key role for securing water, energy, and food, and thus increasing socioeconomic development and reducing poverty worldwide. This is leading developing countries and international agencies to undertake major investments in dam construction, primarily to produce hydropower. Globally, about 3,700 new major dams are planned or under construction. Dam booming has multiple reasons. Hydropower is generally regarded as a valuable renewable and clean energy resource. Additionally, hydropower provides important ancillary services to the electric system as well as non-energy services like flood control and water supply for food production. Despite these many potential benefits, dams can create substantial negative environmental externalities that are commonly underestimated in single large dam developments as well as in the development of multi-dam schemes in large river networks. This talk will analyse the main challenges and barriers to internalizing such externalities, and explore the potential role of ICT and optimal control in supporting a paradigm shift in modern river basin development.

Language: English

Andrea Castelletti is an associate professor of Natural Resources Management and Integrated Water Resources Management at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He is also a senior scientist at ETH Zurich. He has been a visiting scholar at Cornell University, Lancaster University, and University of Western Australia. Until 2015, Andrea was Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Water Research at the University of Western Australia. His research interests include water systems planning and control under uncertainty and risk, decision-making for complex engineering systems, big environmental data analytics and smart sensing, information theory and selection
for environmental decision-making. Andrea is co-author of two international books on integrated water resource management as well as more than 140 publications in international journals, book chapters and conference proceedings. He received an MSc degree in Environmental Engineering and a PhD in Information Technology from Politecnico di Milano.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Andrea Cominola (ECDF/TU Berlin)    I   andrea.cominola@tu-berlin.de