 So good afternoon, and I would like to first of all thank Coach Richel for his welcoming words and also I would like to welcome everybody here colleagues, friends, colleagues from the past, present colleagues and all the other people that are part of the community of IHEDEL. What I want to do today is to say a few words about wicked problems and the reason why I choose actually Wicked Problems as one of the titles here is that to my opinion if you're dealing and working with water you will soon find out that's about wicked problems. Of course, that's not something completely new, but I do think that it's being stronger and stronger the case if you look especially in research, but maybe even more strongly if you look in the practice. So what you can do with that? So what I would like to do is first a few words about why I'm here then say something about Wicked Problems so that everybody is on the same level as I am because there are also some different definitions there. I would like to spend some time on questions to be asked because that's I think one of the reasons why we are here and why we are both doing education and training and research. I would also like to say something about complexity because that's where this wicked side comes into play again. What's happening on the global level? So what are we trying to do about that? And what are possible ways forward? I will not address all the problems. I will just give a couple of examples here and then last but not least how can we as IG Delft contribute to those ways forward and at the end I would like to close the meeting with a few reminders and what my ambition is. So first of all, I am here because water for me is something that I experienced already when I was young. I personally like to swim a lot, but I also like to dive. I like to sail. I like to do all the things that are related to water and that's for me. That's the joy of water. Also later on in life, I experienced a couple of events that showed me also the strength of water and what water can do to you. One example there is I once was measuring discharge measurement. Hydrologists around here know something about that. If you do a discharge measurement, you're very much interested to know the extremes because you're trying to create a curve that tells you something about the relationship about the water level and the discharge. So you would like to do a measurement when you're either at a very low extreme, so less amount of water, or when there is an abundance of water, a flood. So we choose the flooding part. And I was there as an observer with a team in Burkina Faso and we entered the dinghy. We went across the river and they tried to put a rope across the river so that they could use that as a guiding line to do the measurements. But then while they were doing that the rope actually touched the water and the rope was also fixed to the dinghy. And the only thing the captain could do is ask, can everybody swim? And within three seconds the boat was underwater. Luckily everybody could swim. So at the end you were standing on the side of the river bare-feeded or the wrong side of course, Carl's on the other side. And that was one of the ways how I found out what water can also mean. But another one was working in Siberia in the winter and driving on a two-lane road over the frozen river where it shows the strength of water and what it can carry. But also working in Agades in the desert and seeing actually the new wave of water coming in and dry a wadi and knowing that that is supplying water for a city like Agades and measuring also how much water would then be available for a city like that. And then coming in a village after a very long drive through the desert and getting your first glass or a cup of water sometimes with some lemon in there showing you the joy of water or the delight of water when you get something to drink. So for me all those reasons were things why I thought it was important to work on water. And I think what happened then is that later on in my life I started also to see and experience what was happening around us when we were trying to solve problems in different areas. And then it was about engaging with people, talking with people, learning what the problem is but also learning from them where solutions are and what you can do about it and what steps you can take or should not take. But also sometimes you had to draw a conclusion that that was not the right way forward and something was completely blocked and you had to approach it from a different way. So that I think was the trigger for me also a little bit to talk about wicked problems. And what you see here on the screen is actually one representation of a wicked problem. But what it shows is actually that the wicked problem has no clear definition of the problem. The problem can change while you're working on it. Also there are no clear solutions. It can be that one solution may solve a part of the problem but it may enhance the problems that are related to another part to the same system or the same society. So sometimes you have to look at a wicked problem knowing that you will not find one single answer, that you will not find one single method that can help you to research the problem but you have to approach it from different sides. And that's also it makes it difficult but I think it also makes it very interesting on what you can do and what you want to learn from such a problem. Then related to those wicked problems are a number of questions that you can ask yourself. So one of those questions is when does the flood become a nuisance? So for example I don't know if you experienced that this morning already but walking to your car from your house is if you are walking over the street and do you get wet feet? Is that a cause for you to go to your water manager and say hey I'm getting wet feet do something about the flood? Or is that when the water is knee deep or when the water is hip deep? That's almost the point when children are not able to cross or stand in water anymore. So then life becomes threatening, is that the point where you would like to take action? Another one is water scarcity and what scarcity is often about dealing with water availability, knowing how much water is there but very much also about knowing what the water demand is, knowing how you can allocate water and where in time should you do that and also at what place should you have most water available? So what are the critical moments in time and space of the water demand and water availability? And related to that is climate change playing a role in there? Is climate change causing a shift in timing or a shift in the location of where water is available but also where the need of water is? Related to those questions are things like what are our windows of opportunities? How and when do we have enough information to take a decision to set our priorities? How much information do we need? Different perspectives come into play and how can we bring them together? So how can we enable prioritization of actions? And what about equity? Is migration driven by equity imbalance? Is it related to water? Of course in most cases not directly but very often indirectly you could see that there is a connection to water availability and migration but related questions I think that are also related to developments and there you come into questions like are small holder farmers looking towards a sustainable and acceptable level of quality of life or are they going in a dead end street? Should we support actually small holder farmers or should we think about new ways how we can help them coming from a deadlock situation and giving opportunities for another development? Is that possible in every region or should we look at a different solution for different regions? So this is about the different solutions that we would like to look at but if we do that and if we are thinking about those solutions we also very much need to know what the different trends are that are taking place and that's where I would like to draw your attention to so I want to walk with you to a number of trends that are taking place at the global level. The first one is trends in climate change and the graphs that you see here depict a little bit what the CO2 emissions are in CO2 equivalents per year so it shows you actually the increase that we have seen over the last number of years. What you also see at the end is that there is some leveling off actually of the graph which is a positive sign what we are aiming for of course is that this graph goes downward but the leveling off should be the first step. This leveling off is mostly caused by the change in energy production in China and that was very much related to coal mines and they are now shifting slowly to other ways of energy production that has a less impact on CO2 exchange. So very often climate change and CO2 emissions are related to mitigation issues and mitigation issues are very strongly linked to energy and energy supply. What you see here in those two graphs is on the left hand graph you see the energy generation while on the right hand graph you see the cost of energy productivity and what you see also is that in these graphs it's predicted that the fossil use of energy will decrease while the use for example of solar and also of wind energy will increase and especially the solar energy will increase almost exponentially. At the same time you see that the price of energy is changing rather drastically and that next to oil and coal being fossil fuels that also the cost of nuclear energy is increasing and that has to do with the risks assessments that are there and the investments that have been made for that. While again solar energy is also if you look at the price of energy decreasing so that will change our our landscape rather drastically but this is just one trend. The other important part that's related to climate change is adaptation so we spoke mitigation the other side is adaptation and here you see four panels actually if you look on the left hand side on the left hand it's temperature related changed while on the right hand side it's precipitation related change. I put a somewhat different figure here than what you see very often that's average temperature and total precipitation and that has to do with the fact that I think for different sectors it's more important to often use at certain specific indicators in this case extremely related indicators so the two graphs on the right hand side are important if you're interested in flood management so you would like to know a little bit about what your extreme precipitation periods is not necessarily what your total amount of precipitation is while on the left hand side it has to do more with health related research where you would like to know something that says what and how much the temperature will increase or decrease both heat waves but also cold waves are these climate phenomena that cause and trigger a lot of that or a lot of diseases so it's important to know what's happening there. In all those graphs you see for different RCPs which tells you something about the strength of the climate change and also the strength of CO2 and by that the temperature change for all of them you see an increase except maybe for the lowest one which shows you a stabling off and this is related to the temperature change and what's on the board at the moment is a temperature change that we would like to keep within a two degree change and then you're talking about the RCP say 4.5 or 8.5 or anything that's in between there we would not like to go along the 8.5 but at the moment we are if you look at the CO2 emissions more on track of this 8.5 RCP than on the lower one where we would like to be. Now within the fifth assessment report of IPCC they also showed this graph and I think that's nice because this tells you something about what is happening and what sectors are engaged and if you for example look at the Asia box which is on the right hand side and this graph tells you something about what's happening in Asia and what parts can be attributed to climate change so what you see here is that from this study it shows that the glaciers are going to be affected that there is say a high degree of confidence in that this may happen and the same is true actually for the terrestrial ecosystems which has the green symbols on the right hand side also there is confidence in that something will happen with floods and droughts so there will be change in floods and droughts but that's not as strongly attributed to climate change but also to other changes and other changes that maybe related to that is depicted in this graph here this is coming from Iran and shows you the groundwater level for one of the tube wells in Iran and it shows you that in this particular case there is a ground level lowering of half a meter per year so every year the groundwater drops down by more than half a meter and of course it's not too difficult to know that this is not a sustainable situation it's also a situation that they would like to work on the question is then how and what should you do so we'll come back to that later on and I can tell you that this is not the only place where this is happening in a lot of other countries around the world you see either a similar size of dropping groundwater or even a bigger one taking place groundwater is very important because it's often a buffer of where you can take water in a dry period so it's also about water allocation and next to groundwater is also about surface water here I think it's good to draw your attention to what's happening on the level of water treaties um water treaties are on the table already for some time but if you look at say the database that is there from water treaties you will see that most of the water treaties are from before the 1970s of course there's still a number of them on the board that are being negotiated but it also tells you that actually looking at what we have been discussing before and the changes that have been taking place since 1960s 1970s both social economic changes so meaning on water demand and water use but also in climate change it's something that you would like to re-discuss actually those water treaties especially the water treaties that deal with the amount of water that's been available and that's distributed among the different countries that are riparian to a certain riverbed so I do think that there is a lot of tension needed to see how we can further support those negotiations that are dealing with water treaties again I think often with water treaties you think about transboundary issues for different countries in different nations but I do think it also starts at a much lower level so it's also between farmers it's in villages it's also at district level or province level so very often what you see is that as soon as the administrative boundary is not coinciding with a natural boundary being a catchment boundary it's already important to start thinking about how you can distribute the water in there and you know that those discussions will not be very easy related to this trend what I just described is also urbanization and here's a graph and the red line shows you where we are at the moment more or less so you can see for the different continent what's happening there but at the global level we also see that globalization or urbanization is for more than 50 percent of the people living in urban areas at the moment and that will increase to approximately more than 65 percent globally of course in some continents we are already past that stage there are much higher density in the city areas related to this trend is in the population density trend you also have a trend in social media one of them is by smartphones this graph shows you a little bit say the expected increase in the use of smartphones now I'm not an expert in that field but I do think that in the social media there will be other developments also taking place but what you can account on I think is that the interactions that we have in communication that we have in the speed of communication that we have will only increase in the coming years so that means that we should look at what that would mean then also for our water related issues and the problems that that may refer to so one other thing I would like to say about this trend and just as a flow of thinking about that related also to transboundary issues and the smaller scale one is that if you have to change taking place and you're talking about what are conflicts at a certain level it's also good to think about what consequences that may have or what impact that may have and one of them is about migration and I think that if you look at migration and you look at literature of course the influx of refugees into Europe is an important one related to that some mentioning about climate change has been one of the drivers of this migration level that started I think that deserves more research and I do think that it would also be very good and interesting to know where and when it starts at what level does it start and I think that for that reason you need to go to this much lower much more detailed level where you would like to know what what is happening there and why people are being pushed but also how people are being pulled away now the push side for a part I think water and also water availability is a reason that it may push people away and you could think about a drop which you also think about the flood on the pool side it's also about people knowing and hearing about what possibilities there are in cities and there I think social media are playing a role in letting people know what to do or where to go for if they want to look for a new and better situation for them so I do think that these are just two that I'm mentioning there are many more push and pull factors also families of course that's a very important role in the pool part but I do think that's important to think about and I do think that is important to also look from the water side how and what we can contribute into that research if I go a little deeper into a complexity of certain problems I would like to say a few words about water scarcity one reason for that is that my research side what I'm still doing at the university in Amsterdam is very much related to climate and water and then looking at dry extreme so that's why I take this sample because it relates also to my personal work here but first of all about water scarcity definition of water scarcity is the lack of sufficient available water resources to meet water needs in a region and at the moment say approximately three billion people are affected around the world and we do think that that will increase say in the coming decades to more than half of the world being affected by water stressed situations or water scarcity situations this doesn't mean that they are affected the year true but the definition used here is that they are affected at least once a month in the year by a lack of water now when do you have a lack of water and there water scarcity may divide it into two main mechanisms there first one being the physical water scarcity mechanism and the second one being more economic water scarcity and especially with the later one I think perceptions and perspectives are playing a big role and that's why you have this nice drawing here and I'm not sure if your neighbor counts the same number of sticks as your neighbor on your left hand side and right hand side but there are some nice pictures like this where you can have completely different view on a two-dimensional picture let alone problems that we are facing in the water sector where you're talking about many more dimensions than two so water scarcity and what is the definition of a water drought what you see in this drawing is on the left hand side you see the physical water scarcity and on the right hand side you see the economic water scarcity or the social water scarcity now with the physical water scarcity it starts with rain but it's not only about rain and with rain you can talk about the mythological drought but it's also about how much water is being used by a plant so it's about the water demand and that enters the equation one side directly so then you're talking about soil evaporation but also indirectly and then it comes through the plants and it comes to the surface water deficit where you may have evaporation playing an important role and being governed by this surface water or groundwater deficit to know how much will evaporate what's important in there as well is how much water is stored and so the storage of water will play a big role about the amount of water that will evaporate but also amount of water that will be available together with the storage of water and the groundwater deficits as well as the soil water deficit and the surface water deficit you know what water may be used by human mankind now why do I think that the water demand in social economic drought is very important so just to give you an example and that is about say what you can now buy in most shops nowadays is milk coming from almonds and a large part of this almond milk is produced in California and what you see is actually that because of this this market development and this big economic demand but maybe you can also call it a social demand because people start drinking this almond milk because it's more healthier than milk coming from from cows that demand actually increased the need for water and the use of water in California to irrigate almond trees and to increase production there and so this economic or social demand actually triggered different water use in a different continent and by that it also triggered say partly the drought that was experienced in California in the last number of years luckily the last year they had more rain so they partly overcame this problem but it's still an issue that's on the table there and where they're thinking about okay how can you you regulate water and can dispute water availability another example I want to show you here is coming from South Asia and that's about say the amount of water that's needed actually for crop production in South Asia what you see in this graph actually is depicted for the different colors you see different crops that are there but what you also see is the year so it's going actually from January to December from left to right and you see that depending on the time of year the crop needs a different amount of water and what is important here is that if you look for example at the summer period so that's in this case for the months April and May then you primarily need water for sugarcane growth and this water because during this period there is no or almost no rain you need groundwater or surface water storage to extract that water if you go for wheat production and that's coming mainly in November to February March then depending a little bit on which catchment area you're in and here this study was done for three catchment areas one was the industry Ganges in the Bama Putra so depending on which catchment area you were in you need more water coming from either your groundwater source or your surface water source partly added by rain for that was coming in now added complexity besides the distribution of water over the different crops because behind those crops you have different users so you're talking about farmers in the end there are also changes happening and if you look at the two big arrows then one arrow tells you that the amount of water available may change because rainfall patterns may change so that's about monsoon variability changing monsoon patterns changing but also increasing in rainfall intensity another one is the shift in melt so that's mainly in the industry very important where a large part of the water available for irrigation is coming from the melt from snow and partly from ice of the glaciers so if with climate change you will get a temperature increase that will also mean that the timing and availability of water from meltwater industry for basin will change and that are changes where people have to take into account what that means for their crop and then you come into adaptation one thing that I want to mention there related to adaptation that's the way how you apply your irrigation and this figure here shows you three different types of irrigation and one is on the left hand side is surface irrigation and then you have spring irrigation and you have drip irrigation what you see is that there is a lot of subsidies at the moment to introduce drip irrigation the big benefit of drip irrigation is that there is a water use efficiency in there and you can see that because the bars that are under the x-axis are often seen as losses and the bars above it are seen as gains in the sense that transpiration is very strongly related to photosynthesis and by that to your crop yield so your yield depends on how much transpiration you have while the total amount of water of course are those bars added to one another now why is this important is because with surface irrigation you also have a very big return flow and this return flow is the amount of water that's not being used by the crop but that's seeping to the soil and that enters again either in your ground water system or your surface water system if you don't take into account that by introducing a new irrigation technique then you also don't take into account that other people using the same water ground water will have less water because of this drip irrigation system and this is sometimes happening because farmers introducing drip irrigation systems they will either enlarge their crop production in time or they will enlarge their crop production in space and in that way they're still using more water than they were actually using when when they still had surface water irrigation sometimes it's also called the drip irrigation paradox and I do think that that deserves some attention here I listed a number of other possibilities that you can use to adapt if you're looking in excuse me in how you can change water availability and still increase food production but to all of these I think it's important that you think about okay what does that mean for other users and on purpose I put here not the word but the word end because I think it's not by saying hey this is not possible but it's thinking about how to use for some drip irrigation but how can you do it in such a way that's also a same sustainable way for the other users in the catchment area that means that we are looking also at what's happening on the global level there and of course there are a couple of important things that are going on one of them I think is the Paris Agreement very much related to climate change that took place with also the follow-up discussions that were there but the second one I think is the SCGs and here I just picked the different SCGs and I think it's nice that at IHE Delft we put a lot of effort of course in SCG number six which is about clean water and sanitation but it's also about sharing water and that's at the boundary issues but if you look at the summary of the different projects of IHE Delft and I strongly invite you to do that then you will also see that there are a number of other SCGs that are also supported by what we do in the different projects I shown you this because I think that also shows say that the strength but also the strength of water in the sense of bringing sectors together and bringing people together but it also means that it requires a holistic and an integrated view if you want to look at solutions here that's not always easy because then you enter for example in investment in finance and so what you see here is actually the priority areas of the green climate funds and the green climate fund is one of the biggest investment sources meant to overcome or at least adjust also the agreements that were put forward in the NDCs and the INDCs from the Paris Agreement where countries could say what they wanted to do on the level of adaptation but also in mitigation side so what you see here is that although there are a number of topics and on the left hand side you see many issues related to mitigation on the right hand side to adaptation but you also see that they are connected very often and for example urban areas represented by infrastructure and built environment as well as on the left hand side buildings and cities they both benefit both from mitigation but also from adaptation investments but if you have followed the news and have followed the green climate fund a little bit then you will also know that there is a big problem with attribution and that means that in a number of cases proposals are being put forward but they are never been financed and one of the big reasons is that in those proposals it's not clear if it's about development or if it's about say solutions measures that you want to take strongly related to climate change. Now I think that it's very difficult to take those two apart and if it was easy people would have done that already the the issue here being maybe a little bit if that we as a society as a global society should rethink a little bit about how we can bring those different funds together so how can we bring development funds together with climate funds and not start saying okay that's not in my part it should go somewhere else or vice versa because you can't disentangle them completely so I don't think you should also try to disentangle them in your financing instruments so I would strongly urge actually some more research and some more ideas about how can we bring this together as long as we don't do that I think this picture is still in place and that means that we still agree that we should do something with all of us but that we are strongly hampered by implying and implementing possible measures so I hope that we can change this and oops now I did something wrong here so I do hope that we can change that and I would like to give a couple of examples here briefly so one of them is what I think could be done but always say distributed decentralized systems and I think that's something that is interesting because I do think that one reason is to do that with water treatment I think that water treatment for centralized systems is a very difficult one especially because we're facing so huge water quality issues while if you would go for a decentralized system you could approach the problem a little bit more specific for a specific contaminant that you could have in water but another important one is that you see in energy production a lot of the renewable energies is also related to distributed systems and nice examples there I think are also taking place where you see the development of meat grids and I think also from water treatment sites you can also generate energy but also in some cases you need energy so bringing those two together I think would be a nice way forward it could also mean that you could have a possibility where you create a real change in the agricultural sector by making a farmer an energy producer instead of a food producer or maybe a combined producer and there I think there are some nice developments also coming from the Netherlands where you look at greenhouses where you can have both energy production as well as food production but I also think the combination between water treatment plants and where you look at the resources and nutrients that come free from say the residues of the water treatment plants can be used in agriculture again so I do think that you can reinforce and strengthen those combinations if you would do something like that it would also mean that you could reduce transportation costs and it could also mean that you can reduce investment costs because you don't have to invest on a very expensive centralized transportation systems for energy but also for road transportation and also for all other goods transportation water being one of them if you would do that maybe you could also decrease the losses by increasing the lifetime of the product this could mean that you're looking at ways how you can maybe process certain goods at the location because you now have energy available there but you also have the goods available there and if you would then say start up an factory that processes your goods you can process them in such a way that the lifetime of such a product may be longer than it used to be also if you would do that you could most likely expect a large part of the water so you can recycle the water in place there so you're not transporting water but you're transporting the higher quality goods and by that maybe you can also increase the income of the farmers and with that you get back to the thing that I found important as well can we know or can we say something about can we do something about migration and can we reduce conflicts so I think possibilities are there I think it needs and requires actually innovations it also requires that we look at problems something in a somewhat different way but it also means that we need to be able to convince people that they can do things in a different way still having a good quality of life and still being able to live in a way that they would like to be. Another development I see taking place has to do with research and what I put on the graph here is the TRL levels from 1 to 9 everybody everything engaged in an horizontal 2020 project knows this one because this is one of the the requests that they'll do you are asked nowadays to indicate from which TRL level you can bring the product to to the next TRL level and of course they would prefer that you bring it to TRL level 9 now I think that if you look at that I think fundamental research is very much aimed at the first four TRL levels at least how we were doing things at the moment and applied research partly also what we're doing here at IGDELS is very much related to TRL 3 to 5 more or less traditionally but what I do think that we need is we see a shift and I think we also should shift taking place at the universities doing fundamental research so it's a shift downwards so I think they're not skipping TRL 1 they're still doing that but they're also looking at TRL 6 and so universities are also looking a little bit on what before we were calling applied research so that's becoming part of integrated part of fundamental research which I think is a good development but it also means that for the applied research I think we should also go down and I do think that there's a need that we also look at the other TRL levels as a research institute and also as research entity and that we look at how we can bring a certain new innovations into the market and I think especially if you look at the later TRL levels there for me is this wicked part coming into play again because at that point in time and you have to deal very much with different stakeholders and and with different perceptions as well as different solutions but I do think that that's one way how we could further develop and strengthen research that that we're doing now a few words about IG Delft and one development that's already taking place that within the umbrella of capacity development we're looking at research education and institutional strengthening I do think that that's been done from a problem based in a research oriented background and I think that that's driving us as well and what we would like to do what I think that's needed if you want to do that is a flexible structure and I think that flexibility that should come in the whole building that we have over there and I think that that's one way one of the things that I would like to put emphasis upon in say the coming time on how can we do that and I would like to just spend a few words on a couple of issues that I would like to mention now first of all about education and there are a number of developments that are taking place so I'm not saying things that are completely new here but one of them is that I think that if you look at the education training that's been given in some of the countries that are also our partner countries that what you see is you see actually a very good development of the education training that's given in the country itself and so I do see students coming from countries like China but also India Iran that are students that have a real good good level of training and education often I think it's still a little bit on the traditional way on how education and training was given but still I think it's at at a high level I think that we should use that and that means that that positions institutes like IG Delft in a somewhat different position and we'll come back to that in a second and our development that I see is that in a number of countries you have an increase in income but also an increase in interest to pay for their own say education traditionally changed already partly but traditionally IG Delft is also here for developing countries and it's for the poorest of the poorest but I do think that there's also a lot of knowledge and a lot of demand actually for the training that's being given by transition countries and countries that are already one step further and I do think we should open our doors also for those students and interest there that has an important reason and that is something I will tell in the end so keep that in mind if you please if we want to do that and if we are looking at what the amount is coming from the different countries is that you see that in a number of cases governments would like their employees being trained on specific issues also having specific skills so that means that the education and training that we are providing should maybe be streamlined and focused a bit more on where the amount is coming from and how we can adjust our training and education in such a way that we also comply to this demand and I think that's possible but I think that's where the flexibility comes into play of course we're doing already some steps there because one of the issues that's important for those governments but also for other employees or businesses is that they don't lose their employees for a very long time and sometimes 18 months is a bit long and so one of the developments here is that the accreditation has been submitted for the 12 month master course on sanitation here so I do think that that's a very nice development of course important to keep in mind if you can maintain the quality of education but also the quality of the researcher that we hope to deliver at the end and is able to do a PhD after that but secondly we're also looking if there is a possibility to start a five-year master where it will be a master that will be given in say short courses over a period of five year which allows the student to remain in the country and to remain working also for the company that they are so they have not extracted from their work that long as they would be if they would come to the Netherlands for a period of 12 months up to 18 months so I think that that flexibility is something that I would strongly support I also think that IHE can make a difference by offering integrated education and with integrated education I mean that what we're doing is we're trying to put it to the next level of say a certain technical skill but I think that we're also offering and I see that happening already in education that we're providing but I think we can take it even a step further that we're also looking at other skills and that are skills related maybe to how do you start up a private business if you want to do that at the end of your PhD or mctc but also leadership skills if somebody is going back to his government position in most cases they are going back to maybe a production team but we also see if we look at our alumni that some alumni they grow later on so we also think that is important that they're dealing with that but also from our own experience here in the Netherlands but also in other countries more and more of the people engaged in the water sector are also engaged not only on this technical issues but they're also engaged in these discussions where you have to deal with other water users where you have to deal with other stakeholders and for that I think it's also important that they learn those other skills and I think that should go across all the different trainings that we're giving so then a little bit about research now when you leave here you will get this whole booklet and in the back of the booklet as an annex I put an overview of all running PhD research that is being done at IHE or in collaboration with IHE and I would like to invite you to have a look at it because if you have a look at it I think there are now roughly 140 PhD students that are active here at the institute you will also see the diversity in the different research that are done there and this diversity is not only on the different things by the way they're all related to water but they go actually from bacteria towards the global skill and so all skills are there I think they go from really face from technical topics to real social topics I think we can add some topics there but I also think that it shows a little bit the brains and the interests and the research that's available within the institute and I do think we should use our PhD students and our PhD research a little bit better maybe than we are doing at the moment so looking at the valorization of the research done by our PhD community I think that would be something that at least would please me a lot and I would really like to contribute to that part so I do think that this integration is also important so that means that I think the number of the PhD students or maybe even most PhD students they are walking in a very lonely road and that's part of doing a PhD degree but I do think that as iG Delphi should also try to assure that we make some integration there and that we engage them with other colleagues that are dealing with topics that are connected to that and that we assure that they know from one another and they learn also from what is there so I was very happy that at the beginning of the week for two days we had the PhD meetings happening here where they shared their knowledge not only with their counterparts but also with the staff here so I do hope that that will continue happening the third pillar here is institutional strengthening and I think there I would like to go a little bit more about cross-sectoral integration and that means that I do think that as iG Delphi should also try to engage with our partners being in countries most outside of Europe that it should be about how can we bring people from the ministry of water resources together with the ministry of agriculture but it's also about if one of our colleagues who is an expert for example in water treatment goes to a certain place that he keeps in the back of his mind that there are also colleagues who know a lot about what happens with the water demand for example for agriculture and how can you now bring it together sometimes we call this circular economy but I do think there are possibilities to see not only how we bring people together outside of Europe but also how we can within the institute bring people together to work together on on those related issues so what I think in all that I do think that we can't do that alone so I think that important here is also the collaboration with other institutions so that's another thing that I think should be strengthened further and that is that we have to look and have to see how we can find a strong collaboration I think also with the different universities here in the Netherlands and because I think that we already have this network here also with a number of professors have a professorship of different universities in the Netherlands but I think we can use it a bit more and we can push it a bit and see how for example together we can address the topics that are coming from the Dutch scientific agenda and how together we can bring that a step forward but also maybe in different proposals coming from horizon 2020 research agenda I think that's an interesting one to see what they can be done there and I think that if we do that for an institute that IT Delft is also about how we can collaborate with institutions outside of Europe and there are some examples there I will just name one development there and that is happening in India at the moment can we start up say a new education and research sites together with people from private companies in India but also related to different universities in India and how can we do that how can we make this step so I think that's a part that we would like to walk in the future and I think it's an interesting one to go forward one of the things is for me that also creates flexibility in our financial resources that we have in a sense that next to having say very much appreciated resources coming from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and of course the Ministry of Science and Education I do think that we also need to look at if we can come up with other possible ways of funding the activities that we're doing so with that I would like to say that I do think that there is no single answer I think there's also no single answer on how we walk the path towards the future so I'm very much in favor in doing that in a way where we're developing scenarios and look at how we can choose from the different steps that we take that fit in different scenarios that also describe different futures for us I think that is also related to what's coming from the definition of wicked problems and that is that is very strongly related to people and so I do think that one of the most important parts is that you do that together and with together I mean say all the people within the Institute supporting staff academic staff and that you want to walk this path with all those people there and I do hope that we can do that also with the people that we're collaborating with in a larger entity either here in the Netherlands or outside of the Netherlands so maybe with that one thing in my last slide here is my ambition is actually to reinforce the IHDEL's position which I think is already a very strong one a globally strong one as a leading institute for future water leaders in a broad sense with that I would like to thank you for your attention and I would also very much like to invite you for the reception downstairs so thank you very much