Dale Whittington, PhD, Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences & Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will present the EEEP Seminar Series, “Getting Ready for the Anthropocene: The development path for municipal water and sanitation services and the economics of a circular urban water system” on September 10, 2025.
Abstract:
Cities go through three phases for the delivery of municipal water and sanitation services. Whittington identifies the main political, technological, socio-institutional, financial, and public health forces of disequilibria that push cities along this development path. In many water-scarce locations, cities at different stages on this development path will need to reduce their freshwater withdrawals in order to adapt to the changing climatic conditions of the Anthropocene, reduce the risks of ‘Day Zeros,’ and reduce the disruption to the global hydrological cycle. Using a simulation model that characterizes the piped water and wastewater network of an urban water utility in a hypothetical high-income city, he shows that a policy mix with four interventions—leakage reduction, demand reduction, potable reuse, and desalination—can dramatically reduce a city’s raw water withdrawals without proportionally large increases in system-wide costs.
Bio:
Dale Whittington is a Professor in the Departments of Environmental Sciences & Engineering and City & Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University. His research focuses on water and sanitation in low- and mid-income countries, transboundary river basin management, and nonmarket valuation techniques. Whittington is the Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Water Management and Policy. In 2021, he served as the President of the Society for Benefit Cost Analysis. Since 2014, Whittington and Dr. Duncan Thomas have offered the two-part Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), “Water Supply and Sanitation Policy in Developing Countries” on the COURSERA platform. Over 40,000 students have participated from 184 countries.