ConcepT

This lunch lecture will be from one PhD, and one EngD student, that are doing two different research projects. One project will be towards global crop water footprints and its challenges and opportunities. The other part of the lunch lecture will be towards sustainable road pavements

Crop water footprints

 Around 90% of all water that humanity consumes goes to growing crops, such as rice, wheat, soybeans or oil palm. This pressure on water resources (water footprint) contributes to water scarcity, socio-economic instability, and ecosystem degradation in many regions, and yet we need to grow even more crops to sustain the growing global population. That’s why we are trying to see how the global crop water footprints were changing in the recent past so the key challenges and opportunities could be identified. In my presentation, you will be taken on a quick journey through my PhD and see why I need more than 1TB of data to produce just two figures.

Sustainable road pavements

Road pavements go through numerous maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) cycles over their lifetime, each of which generate significant environmental impacts due to their production, construction, use and end-of-life. Understanding and considering these impacts in the planning for M&R is crucial to transition to more sustainable pavement management approaches, which is why the Rijkswaterstaat commissioned my EngD project. In my research, we are applying life-cycle assessment (LCA) to account for the impacts of M&R of the main road network in the Netherlands. We deal with key challenges in the practice related to the suitability of the existent LCA frameworks for M&R, and the lack of consideration of uncertainties in the analysis. Join me to learn more about my research and how we can make pavement management more sustainable.

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