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Water and society: past, present & future

09 - 10 November 2009 09:00 - 17:00

Organised by Sir Brian Hoskins CBE FRS, Professor Steve Mithen FBA and Dr Emily Black. In partnership with the British Academy.

The availability and management of the water supply has been a key driver in human history ever since the time of the first settlement communities of the Neolithic. It continues to be so today, with anthropogenic climate change further exacerbating the existing water crisis on planet earth. This meeting will consider past, present and future relationships between water and society with a particular focus on the Middle East.

The proceedings of this meeting have been published in an issue of Philosophical Transactions A.

Organisers

  • Sir Brian Hoskins CBE FRS, Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London

    "Sir Brian Hoskins became the first Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London in January 2008, and now shares his time between Imperial and Reading University, where he is Professor of Meteorology.  His degrees are in mathematics from the University of Cambridge and he spent post-doc years in the USA before moving to Reading, where he became a professor in his thirties and was a head of department for six years. For the 10 years up to September 2010 he held a Royal Society Research Professorship. His research is in weather and climate, in particular the understanding of atmospheric motion from frontal to planetary scales. His international roles have included being vice-chair of the Joint Scientific Committee for the World Climate Research Programme, President of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences and involvement in the 2007 IPCC international climate change assessment. He has also had numerous UK roles, including membership of The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, and is currently a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change. He is a member of the science academies of the UK, USA, China and Europe and has received a number of awards including the top prizes of the UK and US Meteorological Societies, honorary DScs from the Universities of Bristol and East Anglia, and Honorary Fellowships of a number of institutions. He was knighted in 2007 for his services to the environment. "

  • Professor Steven Mithen FBA, School of Human and Environmental Sciences, University of Reading, UK

    Steven Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory and Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Reading. Having studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and then for a BA (Hons) in Archaeology at Sheffield University and an MSc in Biological Computation at York University, he took his PhD at Cambridge before moving to the University of Reading in 1992. He has been directing archaeological fieldwork in western Scotland since 1987 concerned with Mesolithic settlement and co-directing (with Bill Finlayson) the excavations at the early Neolithic site of WF16 in southern Jordan since 1996. In addition to his interests in early Holocene hunter-gatherers and farmers, he has played a key role in the development of cognitive and computational archaeology. His books include The Prehistory of the Mind (1996), After the Ice (2003) and The Singing Neanderthals (2005), to be followed in November 2010 by To the Islands: An Archaeologist’s Relentless Quest to find the Prehistoric Hunter-gatherers of the Hebrides. Steven is the lead PI of the Leverhulme Trust funded Water, Life & Civilisation project. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. 

  • Dr Emily Black, Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, UK

    Emily Black is a senior research fellow at National Centre for Atmospheric Science – Climate Division (NCAS-Climate), based at the University of Reading. Her research interests include the impact of climate variability and change on society, the climate of Africa and the Middle East, and seasonal forecasting. After completing a D.Phil. in Andean tectonics at the University of Oxford, Emily moved to the University of Reading as a post-doctoral research fellow funded by PROMISE, an EU project that focused on monsoon variability. After working for a further two years as a member of the core team for COAPEC (Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Processes And European Climate), she moved into her current position of project manager for the Leverhulme funded Water, Life and Civilisation project.