Water availability and quality: natural environments, domestic use and food production (WaterSci)

这一项目可能解决了人类面临的最大挑战：在对我们的星球适应气候变化的能力日益关切的背景下，养活接近70亿的世界人口。政府间气候变化专门委员会最近的报告(http://www.ipcc.ch/))强调，到2100年，全球地表升温预计将增加2-4摄氏度，降雨模式和强度发生重大扰动，预计将导致严重干旱和更频繁的洪灾，这对粮食生产和维持安全可靠的供水都是严重问题。现在，可能比过去任何时候都更需要创新，以确保我们能够成功应对这样的全球挑战。供水安全和水质的改善也将对世界部分地区的可持续发展和健康产生重大的积极影响，这些地区对英国作为新兴市场日益重要。为了应对这一挑战，我们需要创新：量化农业用水需求；提高粮食生产中的水和资源利用效率；量化和改善水污染的程度、来源、去向和对健康的影响；开发新的环境建模能力；采用新兴的智能环境传感器技术，并更多地利用生物固体和废水。来自兰开斯特环境中心和中国的几个实验室的Water Sci投标，建议专注于开发和利用工具，以应对这一全球创新挑战和市场机遇。

This project addresses perhaps the greatest challenge facing humankind: feeding a world population approaching 7 billion against a background of growing concern over our planet's capacity to adapt to a changing climate. The recent IPCC report (http://www.ipcc.ch/) highlights both a predicted increase of 2-4oC in global surface warming by 2100 and significant perturbation in patterns and intensity of rainfall predicted to lead to serious droughts and more frequent flooding, both severe problems for food production and for the maintenance of a safe and secure water supply. Now, possibly more than at any time in the past, is there a need for innovation to ensure we can successfully meet such a global challenge. Improvement in security of supply and quality of water would also have a significant positive impact on sustainable development and health in parts of the world increasingly important to the UK as emerging markets. To meet this challenge, we need innovation to: quantify agricultural water requirements; increase water and resource use efficiency in food production; quantify and ameliorate the extent, source, fate and health impacts of water contamination; develop new environmental modelling capabilities; adopt emerging intelligent environmental sensor technology and take greater use of biosolids and wastewater. The WaterSci bid from the Lancaster Environment Centre and several labs in China, a partnership which leads the world in sustainable water management, proposes to focus on the development and exploitation of tools to deliver on this global innovation challenge and market opportunity.