June 23, 2023 (Friday, 10:30-12:00 JST)
About the Webinar
Safe water sustainability extends beyond infrastructure. Often community members must walk to and often financially support the safe drinking water infrastructure in these locations, public health depends on community action. Too often a safe source is physically built in a community and the residents are counted as being provided with safe water. These tallies influence the statistics of development. Despite this potential over counting, 2 billion people still lack ‘safe’ drinking water, including 800 million people without even ‘basic’ water services. This is not for lack of investment in water development; despite decades of support for water development projects many in rural areas of low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) still lack access. This talk will explore the concept of “access” in two areas of India: Eastern Maharashtra and West Bengal.
About the Speaker
Dr. Katherine Alfredo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida. Dr. Alfredo’s research focuses on sustainable potable water provisions to include technical treatment, regulatory policy, and community uptake and trust both within the U.S. and internationally. While Dr. Alfredo has experience working in Ghana (U.S. Student Fulbright Fellow, ’08), her current international work is based in India where she investigates how and why rurally implemented drinking water treatment plants succeed or fail when their management is transferred to the community. This line of inquiry began during her Postdoctoral tenure as a Columbia University Earth Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia Water Center, and was enriched during her 2015 Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Scholarship. Prior to joining the faculty at USF, she was the Research Program Manager at DC Water focused on the difficulties large, urban utilities face in ensuring a constant supply of high quality, potable water. She earned advanced degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and holds a Professional Engineering license in the state of Virginia.
About the NERPS Webinar Series
The Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) at Hiroshima University in Japan is hosting a series of webinars on the relationship between peace and sustainability in the context of environmental, socio-political, economic, and technological transformations. This series is situated within the urgent need to deal with the implications of global change, including the COVID-19 pandemic, for peace and sustainability. The webinar sessions serve as a platform for rethinking and updating the current discourse on peace and sustainability amidst these global challenges and transformations. Leading experts will discuss the role of resources, digital technologies, migration, governance, and education in peacebuilding, conflict mitigation, humanitarian aid, and capacity-building, among other components that contribute to the achievement of the Sustainability Development Goals, particularly that of Goal 16 on Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. Check out our previous webinars here.
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