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The University of À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ’s Water Institute has awarded a combined total of $72,692 to four research teams as a result of its 2017 fall term seed grant competition. The goal of this program is to catalyze interdisciplinary collaboration, facilitate interaction with international authorities, and to encourage the development of research proposals.

The program awards a total of $150,000 annually, with competitions generally held during the fall and winter terms.

Cold regions are experiencing dramatic changes to regional climate and environmental conditions, bringing about more severe floods, longer drought periods and deterioration of water quality that are putting economies, communities and ecosystems at risk. Six new University of À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ-led research projects that are part of the Global Water Futures program, will catalyze interdisciplinary research to help tackle these environmental challenges.

In the past two decades, the world’s ten worst floods have done more than a hundred and sixty-five billion dollars’ worth of damage and driven more than a billion people from their homes. In the summer of 2017 alone, Hurricane Harvey dumped more than fifty inches of rain over Texas, a monster monsoon season damaged more than eight hundred thousand homes in India, and flash floods and mudslides claimed at least five hundred lives in Sierra Leone.

Chris Parsons canoeing to a sampling site in Coot's Paradise near Toronto.

Professor Mark Servos, Canada Research Chair in Water Quality Protection and professor of Biology, Nandita Basu, professor in the Departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering, and post-doctoral fellow, Kim Van Meter, were prominently featured in Kitchener-À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ’s local newspaper.

Today, 4.5 billion people live without a household toilet that safely disposes of their waste. , which took place on Sunday, November 19, is about inspiring action to tackle the global sanitation crisis.

The University of À¶Ý®ÊÓƵ has entered into a partnership with the University of Alberta and Insituform Technologies to improve the maintenance of water distribution pipelines.

The partnership is part of the (AOP)-NSERC program.

Water samples taken from Lake Superior show that the Thunder Bay area appears to have a significant amount of plastic pollutants.

The samples were collected in 2014 as part of a fish survey on Lake Superior by an American research team.