hello everyone before I start sharing my
story with you today I want you to take
a couple seconds and think of what you
wanted to be when you grow up when you
were a little child how many of you are
doing the same thing today well I don’t
see a lot of hands but we’ll get back to
that ever since I was a young child I
was fascinated with bridges I was
fascinated by the power they had in
connecting once disconnected communities
and areas of land fast forward into my
early years of college and that I was
planning a Korean for myself and civil
engineering where I could design and
build those bridges that I always
dreamed of as part of my final year in
my civil engineering undergraduate
studies I had the chance to work with an
underprivileged community in a in an
area a neighboring refugee camp and
Beirut the capital city of my home
country Lebanon one of the very
interesting things of the area we worked
in was its location at the borderline
between two different municipalities and
those different municipalities had
different agendas and different sets of
priorities
the Saha area we worked and suffered
from different challenges one of those
challenges was a deteriorated
deteriorating piping Network as well as
clogging in in its drainage facilities
as well as challenges and the
transportation flows in the area that
was highly dense and populated in that
urban center so for the following few
months after first visiting the site and
learning more about these challenges we
worked on designing and proposing
different designs for rehabilitating
this piping network for addressing the
challenges of the clogging in the area
as well as redesigning and proposing new
designs for circulation flows for
improving the traffic situation of the
area and after that we had the chance to
meet with the community so we can share
with them our proposed design and get
our feedback and to our surprise
most of what we proposed after three
four months of four
got rejected how could that be we worked
on these designs for several months we
worked according to the codes that we
learned we double-checked our
calculations and we made sure that
everything made sense so how could it be
that most of what we proposed did not go
through well it happens that one of the
things we were proposing was to change
the functionality of one of the main
roads in that area because it simply
made more engineering sense for us it
made it easier for us to rehabilitate
one of the main pipelines in the area
and that was not popular among different
city residents because they wanted the
road to stay the same and we were
further also we had the challenge of
convincing both municipalities with the
same options because they had to be
partners in those solutions and there
was a challenge also and bringing both
both people to the table who are
decision-makers on both sides of the
municipalities so as I was ready to
finish with my civil engineering degree
at the time I this this project made me
learn three important lessons the first
lesson was that engineering know-how
alone was not sufficient to address
these challenges we needed to look at
the political social economic challenges
that also came with the engineering
challenge that we had in hand in order
for us to propose solutions that made
sense and were implementable the second
lesson was the importance of the early
on involvement of the community in the
decision-making process and in the
co-creation of the solutions rather than
being the engineers who are the problem
solvers who know better and impose
solutions on the community and the third
was the importance of not only creating
that scientific and engineering
knowledge but spending a lot of time on
communicating that knowledge to to
support the decision making process and
to support those who are making those
decisions on both sides of the spectrum
moving forward and as I started my
graduate work at Purdue University I
started looking at three
grand challenges that are facing our
global community today water security
energy security and food security do you
know that by 2050 we are projected to
need fifty five percent more water 60
percent more food and 80 percent more
energy and the challenge is not only
limited with our ability to bridge these
demands independently because for a
simple fact that there is a growing
interdependence between those challenges
so we need a lot of water for our
agricultural sector to grow our
agricultural product as well as a lot of
water that goes into energy development
and energy production and similarly
there’s a lot of energy that is needed
to pumping transporting desalinating and
treating our water as well as a lot of
energy that goes throughout the
agricultural supply chain from farm to
table so unless we understand how these
challenges are interconnected and
interdependent we will fail to address
them as we move forward and there’s a
critical need also for moving that
understanding into the policymaking
community so we are able to also propose
and implement policies that are coherent
and are consistent with our
understanding of those interconnections
take the case of San Antonio for example
all of these dots you see on the map are
water wells the blue dots are water
wells for municipal views green dots are
water wells for irrigation and food
production and the red dots are water
wells for energy production and we can
clearly and quickly start seeing the
extent of competition that exists
between these three growing sectors in
the area of San Antonio where these
three sectors these three growing
sectors compete over the same water land
and financial resources in the region
and then a study we we’ve been working
on with the water energy food Nexus
initiative at Texas A&M we’ve learned
that low level of communication exists
between different agencies and
organizations that help govern and
for these resource systems even though
we can clearly see the tight
interconnections and competition that
exists between them and this kind of hot
spot is not only limited to Texas it
emerges and appears in different places
all over the world and it appears in
different shapes and levels of urgency
in different regions and that the water
energy food Nexus research group here on
campus we’ve been exploring a lot of
these case studies all over the world
and even though a lot of our
understanding of the holistic systems of
systems thinking that that guide our
understanding of the interconnections
between these three challenges the
interventions and the solutions for
addressing them are very much
site-specific and context specific so
don’t you wish we had planned a global
plan to address all of these global
challenges that we’ve been talking about
well if your answer is yes I have some
good news for you because we actually do
and in fact in 2015 193 heads of states
that are member nations to the United
Nations met and agreed to work towards
17 sustainable development goals these
sustainable development goals include
ones that are specific to water energy
and food security but also extend much
more beyond that to those that are
addressing alleviating poverty hunger
good health quality education gender
equality climate change and building
global partnerships among others having
a plan is good but it’s only as good as
the effort we put into it and then
unless we all get on board and find our
role in contributing to this agenda and
these goals we will not be able to
arrive to it the 2030 that we’re
planning for and this set of goals
comes it’s not the first time we do this
exercise and this set of goals in fact
comes after another set of goals which
we adopted in year 2000 and we work
towards in the last 15 year period those
goals address different challenges that
focused on challenges that we’re facing
developing countries and we have done a
lot of progress
where those goals successful where
they’re useful absolutely yes were we
able to achieve all of those goals that
we aimed for and the 15-year period
absolutely not
but we’ve done a lot of progress and
what we need to do now is to amplify
that momentum in order for us to to
carry us forward into achieving the new
set of goals and the new sustainability
goals that we set for ourselves for 2030
so to just give you an idea of the kind
of progress that such kind of goals was
was was able to help us achieve so in
having those Millennium Development
Goals have focused our effort globally
to cut extreme poverty by half reality
is we still have one out of five seven
people that will go hungry tonight and
is living still on less than 1.25
dollars per day let that sink in for a
second in the last 15 years we were able
to improve primary education enrollment
from 83 percent to 91 percent which is a
great achievement yet one out of ten
children are still not in school today
according to the Millennium Development
Goal indicators we were able to meet
gender equality indicators in the
primary school level yet reality is
women still hold less secure jobs than
men and we still have a long way to go
in terms of gender equality child
mortality was cut by more than half
which is also another great achievement
yet six million children still die
before their fifth birthday today
and last but not least in the past 15
years we were able to improve the
sanitation of one fourth of the world
yet reality is one in three people still
do not have access to proper sanitation
so you could think of this as a marathon
and we are half way so it doesn’t make
sense for us to just stop halfway I
don’t think so so what we need to do is
find our role in in this Global Agenda
and be able to with with our different
disciplines with the different countries
that we come from with the different age
groups we come from different
generations and different interests to
be able to find our role so we could
collectively be able to to work towards
addressing these challenges and one
particular thing I’d like to bring your
attention to also is that what we need
to do in order for us to arrive to these
2030 goals is also be innovative and
creative in the way we look at and
proposing different solutions and at
looking at the interconnections between
those challenges as well because
business as usual models will fail to
help us arrive to to those goals that we
have so going back to the water energy
and food sustainable development goals
that I’m working on we are making a lot
of progress yet reality is in 2017 844
million still lack access to safe
drinking water and a lot of water stress
indicators are most severe in areas that
are least able to respond to those
challenges and are hubs for major
population density globally 1.1 billion
still lack access to energy 50% of which
are in the African continent and 815
million still do not have access to
secure food and also climate change
vulnerability indicators will all only
exacerbate those challenges again in
areas that are least capable of
responding to those challenges so all of
these challenges that we’re talking
about are very complex and very
interconnected and no one discipline
will be able to address them and find
solutions for them so there is a very
important need for us to build bridges
across different disciplines and be able
to
to work collectively towards addressing
these challenges in order for us to
arrive to the 2030 that we’re aiming for
there’s also an important lead for us to
bridge and make bridges between
scientific know-how and the policymaking
community so we are able also to develop
solutions and policies that are coherent
and consistent with our scientific
understanding so we are able to address
those those complex challenges a little
more than a decade ago I was planning a
career in building and designing bridges
little did I know my journey will bring
me here today to give a talk still about
building bridges but the different kind
of bridges bridges that are needed
between different disciplines and
bridges that are needed between science
and policy unless we work more on
building those bridges and investing our
time and effort in working across
disciplines and working across
communicating the scientific know-how
into the policymaking community we will
have additional challenges into arriving
to the future that that we’re looking
for
and here I’d like to take this
opportunity to talk to people of my
generation the generation of future
leaders generation of future scientists
future economists future politicians and
future engineers we do not only have the
power but the responsibility of bridging
those challenges and understanding those
challenges and we have the
responsibility of reversing the
unsustainable trends that that we face
today and in order for us to arrive to
that we might need a fresh look at the
way our society is function and the
value systems of our societies in order
to arrive to those challenges we need to
also be doing that while keeping an open
mind and looking beyond the traditional
definitions of our disciplines and they
cannot be confined within those
definitions
and make sure that we are reaching out
and to other disciplines so we are able
to address these challenges and while
we’re all collectively working towards
these goals we need to also make sure
that we keep our journeys unique and
personal so my personal journey has made
me arrive today to want to contribute
through better understanding and
quantifying the interconnections between
water energy and food security and
translating that knowledge and spending
the effort on communicating that
knowledge of interconnections and
trade-offs with policy makers in order
to arrive to policies that are coherent
and consistent with that understanding
how will you choose to contribute and I
say choose because you have the power of
choice of either doing nothing accepting
the status quo or having a high level of
Mellor ISM and being part of a 2030 be
part of the marathon and be part of that
finish line that is more sustainable
equitable and inclusive for all thank you very much
story with you today I want you to take
a couple seconds and think of what you
wanted to be when you grow up when you
were a little child how many of you are
doing the same thing today well I don’t
see a lot of hands but we’ll get back to
that ever since I was a young child I
was fascinated with bridges I was
fascinated by the power they had in
connecting once disconnected communities
and areas of land fast forward into my
early years of college and that I was
planning a Korean for myself and civil
engineering where I could design and
build those bridges that I always
dreamed of as part of my final year in
my civil engineering undergraduate
studies I had the chance to work with an
underprivileged community in a in an
area a neighboring refugee camp and
Beirut the capital city of my home
country Lebanon one of the very
interesting things of the area we worked
in was its location at the borderline
between two different municipalities and
those different municipalities had
different agendas and different sets of
priorities
the Saha area we worked and suffered
from different challenges one of those
challenges was a deteriorated
deteriorating piping Network as well as
clogging in in its drainage facilities
as well as challenges and the
transportation flows in the area that
was highly dense and populated in that
urban center so for the following few
months after first visiting the site and
learning more about these challenges we
worked on designing and proposing
different designs for rehabilitating
this piping network for addressing the
challenges of the clogging in the area
as well as redesigning and proposing new
designs for circulation flows for
improving the traffic situation of the
area and after that we had the chance to
meet with the community so we can share
with them our proposed design and get
our feedback and to our surprise
most of what we proposed after three
four months of four
got rejected how could that be we worked
on these designs for several months we
worked according to the codes that we
learned we double-checked our
calculations and we made sure that
everything made sense so how could it be
that most of what we proposed did not go
through well it happens that one of the
things we were proposing was to change
the functionality of one of the main
roads in that area because it simply
made more engineering sense for us it
made it easier for us to rehabilitate
one of the main pipelines in the area
and that was not popular among different
city residents because they wanted the
road to stay the same and we were
further also we had the challenge of
convincing both municipalities with the
same options because they had to be
partners in those solutions and there
was a challenge also and bringing both
both people to the table who are
decision-makers on both sides of the
municipalities so as I was ready to
finish with my civil engineering degree
at the time I this this project made me
learn three important lessons the first
lesson was that engineering know-how
alone was not sufficient to address
these challenges we needed to look at
the political social economic challenges
that also came with the engineering
challenge that we had in hand in order
for us to propose solutions that made
sense and were implementable the second
lesson was the importance of the early
on involvement of the community in the
decision-making process and in the
co-creation of the solutions rather than
being the engineers who are the problem
solvers who know better and impose
solutions on the community and the third
was the importance of not only creating
that scientific and engineering
knowledge but spending a lot of time on
communicating that knowledge to to
support the decision making process and
to support those who are making those
decisions on both sides of the spectrum
moving forward and as I started my
graduate work at Purdue University I
started looking at three
grand challenges that are facing our
global community today water security
energy security and food security do you
know that by 2050 we are projected to
need fifty five percent more water 60
percent more food and 80 percent more
energy and the challenge is not only
limited with our ability to bridge these
demands independently because for a
simple fact that there is a growing
interdependence between those challenges
so we need a lot of water for our
agricultural sector to grow our
agricultural product as well as a lot of
water that goes into energy development
and energy production and similarly
there’s a lot of energy that is needed
to pumping transporting desalinating and
treating our water as well as a lot of
energy that goes throughout the
agricultural supply chain from farm to
table so unless we understand how these
challenges are interconnected and
interdependent we will fail to address
them as we move forward and there’s a
critical need also for moving that
understanding into the policymaking
community so we are able to also propose
and implement policies that are coherent
and are consistent with our
understanding of those interconnections
take the case of San Antonio for example
all of these dots you see on the map are
water wells the blue dots are water
wells for municipal views green dots are
water wells for irrigation and food
production and the red dots are water
wells for energy production and we can
clearly and quickly start seeing the
extent of competition that exists
between these three growing sectors in
the area of San Antonio where these
three sectors these three growing
sectors compete over the same water land
and financial resources in the region
and then a study we we’ve been working
on with the water energy food Nexus
initiative at Texas A&M we’ve learned
that low level of communication exists
between different agencies and
organizations that help govern and
for these resource systems even though
we can clearly see the tight
interconnections and competition that
exists between them and this kind of hot
spot is not only limited to Texas it
emerges and appears in different places
all over the world and it appears in
different shapes and levels of urgency
in different regions and that the water
energy food Nexus research group here on
campus we’ve been exploring a lot of
these case studies all over the world
and even though a lot of our
understanding of the holistic systems of
systems thinking that that guide our
understanding of the interconnections
between these three challenges the
interventions and the solutions for
addressing them are very much
site-specific and context specific so
don’t you wish we had planned a global
plan to address all of these global
challenges that we’ve been talking about
well if your answer is yes I have some
good news for you because we actually do
and in fact in 2015 193 heads of states
that are member nations to the United
Nations met and agreed to work towards
17 sustainable development goals these
sustainable development goals include
ones that are specific to water energy
and food security but also extend much
more beyond that to those that are
addressing alleviating poverty hunger
good health quality education gender
equality climate change and building
global partnerships among others having
a plan is good but it’s only as good as
the effort we put into it and then
unless we all get on board and find our
role in contributing to this agenda and
these goals we will not be able to
arrive to it the 2030 that we’re
planning for and this set of goals
comes it’s not the first time we do this
exercise and this set of goals in fact
comes after another set of goals which
we adopted in year 2000 and we work
towards in the last 15 year period those
goals address different challenges that
focused on challenges that we’re facing
developing countries and we have done a
lot of progress
where those goals successful where
they’re useful absolutely yes were we
able to achieve all of those goals that
we aimed for and the 15-year period
absolutely not
but we’ve done a lot of progress and
what we need to do now is to amplify
that momentum in order for us to to
carry us forward into achieving the new
set of goals and the new sustainability
goals that we set for ourselves for 2030
so to just give you an idea of the kind
of progress that such kind of goals was
was was able to help us achieve so in
having those Millennium Development
Goals have focused our effort globally
to cut extreme poverty by half reality
is we still have one out of five seven
people that will go hungry tonight and
is living still on less than 1.25
dollars per day let that sink in for a
second in the last 15 years we were able
to improve primary education enrollment
from 83 percent to 91 percent which is a
great achievement yet one out of ten
children are still not in school today
according to the Millennium Development
Goal indicators we were able to meet
gender equality indicators in the
primary school level yet reality is
women still hold less secure jobs than
men and we still have a long way to go
in terms of gender equality child
mortality was cut by more than half
which is also another great achievement
yet six million children still die
before their fifth birthday today
and last but not least in the past 15
years we were able to improve the
sanitation of one fourth of the world
yet reality is one in three people still
do not have access to proper sanitation
so you could think of this as a marathon
and we are half way so it doesn’t make
sense for us to just stop halfway I
don’t think so so what we need to do is
find our role in in this Global Agenda
and be able to with with our different
disciplines with the different countries
that we come from with the different age
groups we come from different
generations and different interests to
be able to find our role so we could
collectively be able to to work towards
addressing these challenges and one
particular thing I’d like to bring your
attention to also is that what we need
to do in order for us to arrive to these
2030 goals is also be innovative and
creative in the way we look at and
proposing different solutions and at
looking at the interconnections between
those challenges as well because
business as usual models will fail to
help us arrive to to those goals that we
have so going back to the water energy
and food sustainable development goals
that I’m working on we are making a lot
of progress yet reality is in 2017 844
million still lack access to safe
drinking water and a lot of water stress
indicators are most severe in areas that
are least able to respond to those
challenges and are hubs for major
population density globally 1.1 billion
still lack access to energy 50% of which
are in the African continent and 815
million still do not have access to
secure food and also climate change
vulnerability indicators will all only
exacerbate those challenges again in
areas that are least capable of
responding to those challenges so all of
these challenges that we’re talking
about are very complex and very
interconnected and no one discipline
will be able to address them and find
solutions for them so there is a very
important need for us to build bridges
across different disciplines and be able
to
to work collectively towards addressing
these challenges in order for us to
arrive to the 2030 that we’re aiming for
there’s also an important lead for us to
bridge and make bridges between
scientific know-how and the policymaking
community so we are able also to develop
solutions and policies that are coherent
and consistent with our scientific
understanding so we are able to address
those those complex challenges a little
more than a decade ago I was planning a
career in building and designing bridges
little did I know my journey will bring
me here today to give a talk still about
building bridges but the different kind
of bridges bridges that are needed
between different disciplines and
bridges that are needed between science
and policy unless we work more on
building those bridges and investing our
time and effort in working across
disciplines and working across
communicating the scientific know-how
into the policymaking community we will
have additional challenges into arriving
to the future that that we’re looking
for
and here I’d like to take this
opportunity to talk to people of my
generation the generation of future
leaders generation of future scientists
future economists future politicians and
future engineers we do not only have the
power but the responsibility of bridging
those challenges and understanding those
challenges and we have the
responsibility of reversing the
unsustainable trends that that we face
today and in order for us to arrive to
that we might need a fresh look at the
way our society is function and the
value systems of our societies in order
to arrive to those challenges we need to
also be doing that while keeping an open
mind and looking beyond the traditional
definitions of our disciplines and they
cannot be confined within those
definitions
and make sure that we are reaching out
and to other disciplines so we are able
to address these challenges and while
we’re all collectively working towards
these goals we need to also make sure
that we keep our journeys unique and
personal so my personal journey has made
me arrive today to want to contribute
through better understanding and
quantifying the interconnections between
water energy and food security and
translating that knowledge and spending
the effort on communicating that
knowledge of interconnections and
trade-offs with policy makers in order
to arrive to policies that are coherent
and consistent with that understanding
how will you choose to contribute and I
say choose because you have the power of
choice of either doing nothing accepting
the status quo or having a high level of
Mellor ISM and being part of a 2030 be
part of the marathon and be part of that
finish line that is more sustainable
equitable and inclusive for all thank you very much
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