Speaker Details

Dr Daniel Zimmer

Biography

Daniel Zimmer has a background in Agricultural Engineering. He graduated from the French “Institut National d’Agronomie” in Paris and completed a PhD on drainage systems in University Paris VI. He spent a great part of his career at the Cemagref, the French Agricultural and Environmental Engineering Research Centre. In this Centre, he started as a researcher and became Head of a Research Unit dealing with the impacts of drainage systems on flow regimes and water quality, with salinity management in irrigated systems and with combined drainage and lining systems for landfills. He then became Deputy Head of the Department on Water and Environmental Engineering, where he was in charge of supervising and guiding research of several research teams dealing with water issues. After these 15 years at the Cemagref, with a great interest for the work in multicultural and multidisciplinary projects and with good experience in human resources management, D. Zimmer currently occupies the position of Executive Director of the World Water Council in Marseilles, convinced of the drawbacks of the fragmentation of the water sector and of the need for new institutions to unify it. Used to controversies, for instance on the impacts of drainage on the environment, he knows the importance of dialogue among stakeholders and of collective expertise that allow critical issues that need particular attention to be identified in order to progress.

Abstract

Water Resources: the Need for Increased Hydrosolidarity

The presentation will analyse the reasons of the current water scarcity crisis and show that an important challenge to overcome it is to change the usual water resources paradigm by enlarging the concept to all types of water. In the classical approaches, only blue water i.e. water from rivers, lakes and groundwater is considered as the resource. It is however necessary to include green water (i.e. rainwater stored in the soils) and virtual water (i.e. water embedded in the traded products) in the reasoning. The specific case of Tunisia will be used to illustrate a possible new approach and some practical conclusions will be derived from this specific case study.