Skip to main content

Clean Water and Sanitation

About the Goal

Clean Water and Sanitation

The United Nations aims to ensure the availability of clean water and sanitation for all by 2030. 

Northwestern is engaged in a broad range of initiatives aimed at realizing this goal, including efforts to address current and emerging challenges related to the sustainability, efficiency and robustness of water systems, the development of universal measures of household water insecurity, nature-based approaches to addressing water shortages, pollution in water systems and flood mitigation, research examining urban microclimate regulation and more.

 

 

Northwestern Experts and Initiatives

Aaron Packman

Aaron Packman is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Director of the Northwestern Center for Water Research, which links the University’s water research efforts in basic sciences, technological advancement, law and policy, and systems analysis and simulation.  Packman’s personal work focuses on the study of environmental transport processes, including both hydrodynamic transport processes and reactive transport processes. A lot of this work involves sediments, including transport processes in sediment beds, the implications of physicochemical particle-particle interactions for fine sediment transport, and the role of sediments in contaminant transport. Packman also teaches classes related to environmental fluid mechanics, transport, and modeling.

Aaron Packman
Sera Young

Sera Young

Sera Young is an associate professor of Anthropology and the Director of Water Insecurity at the Northwestern Center for Water Research.  Her research focuses on the of maternal and child-undernutrition in the first 1000 days, especially in low-resource settings. Methodologically, she draws on her training in medical anthropology, international nutrition and HIV to take a biocultural approach to understanding how mothers in low-resource settings cope to preserve their health and that of their families. A key pillar of her research focuses on creating a cross-culturally valid measure of household water insecurity and its consequences.

Featured Course

Native American Environmental Issues and the Media (367-0-20)

This course introduces you to Native American environmental issues, such as treaty-based hunting, fishing, and gathering rights; air and water quality issues; mining; land-to-trust issues; and sacred sites with a particular emphasis on the First Nations in the Great Lakes region. In addition, it will also provide connections to corresponding international Indigenous environmental issues, and the responses and debates across science research, news and international policy contexts.

Explore the course