The Howard Wheater Lecture fosters interests and excellence in hydrological sciences. This award is named in honour of Howard Wheater, the founding director of the Global Institute for Water Security, Canada Excellence Research Chair Laureate, and world expert in hydrological sciences and sustainable water resources management. In addition, Professor Wheater is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the American Geophysical Union, and winner of the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water. 

Each year this special award is presented on World Water Day.

Claudia Pahl-Wostl

Dr. Claudia Pahl-Wostl is the international thought-leader in water governance and management, a field of major global importance at the interface of natural and socio-economic sciences. She has an h-index of 64, over 18,300 citations (Google Scholar), has contributed to the authorship of more than 30 books- one of which has been translated into 7 languages- and has acted as editor for twelve special issues in leading peer-reviewed journals. As adaptation to climate change has raised global awareness about the role of human agency in sustainability science, Dr. Pahl-Wostl’s cutting-edge research in understanding the importance of social learning, anticipatory governance, adaptive management and knowledge mobilization for sustainable water development is timely, relevant and trailblazing. Her ideas elevate the fields of ecology, hydrology and climate science to develop the critical social infrastructure necessary to adapt water systems to abrupt and uncertain environmental change. In recognition of her eminence, in 2012, she was awarded the prestigious Bode Foundation Water Management Prize for the pioneering interdisciplinary work on “Governance in times of change” and comparative analyses of water governance in large river basins.

Dr. Pahl-Wostl works at the leading-edge of the national, European and global water research community. She has held increasingly senior positions at the University of Osnabrück, Germany- including Director of the University’s Institute for Environmental Systems Research and inaugural Chair of Resource Management- and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Sciences and Technology. She has applied her formidable leadership skills to numerous global water projects, including Co-Chair of the Global Water System Project and is now Chair of the Water Governance group of the “Sustainable Water Future Program”, a core project of Future Earth. She has also led many European projects, including the EU HarmoniCOP (Harmonizing Collaborative Planning on the role of social learning and IC-tools in participatory learning with focus on the European Water Framework Directive); the EU project cluster Human Dimension in Water Management; the Integrated Project NEWATER (new methods for adaptive water management – which developed new methods for integrated water management taking into account the complexity of the river basins to be managed and the difficulty to predict the factors influencing them); and the EU project Twin2Go (Coordinating Twinning partnerships towards adaptive governance in river basins, aimed at drawing general lessons on adaptive water governance in the context of climate change from a range of projects on integrated water resources management). She is also very active with The Integrated Assessment Society (TIAS)- as inaugural president and, now, vice-president- where she participates in shaping best practices in knowledge mobilization of integrative assessment.