Water Wheel May/June 2021

Abstract

Finding spring in the heart of winter The following message was conveyed at the 2021 graduation of MSc students at IHE Delft. The year 2020 was almost uniformly, across the world, a Global Winter Of Discontent. We are still greeted on a daily basis by the updates of the COVID-19 pandemic’s new infections and mortality numbers reminding us that in spite of a vaccine roll-out in most parts of the world, we are far from declaring a decisive end to 21st century plague. In fact, the hope that 2021 will be the last year of the epidemic is seriously in doubt. And the other three horses of the modern apocalypse show little sign of abating. The first is the global climate crisis. We have been on a downward slide since Kyoto, with a renewed glimmer of hope in Paris. We then had to endure four very hard years as the fossil fuel lobby almost succeeded in relegating the Paris Agreement to the dustheaps of history. In fact, in these years the climate crisis led a quartet at the top of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Register, a perception survey of the leadership of the global economy.

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