Water: an essential resource (Coursera)

One of the most obvious claims in our everyday life is the importance of water, often called the blue gold. Anyway, we are often incapable of shifting this importance in tangible actions aimed at protecting this resource and optimizing its use. Past and present anthropic pressure has heavily impaired fresh water, usually supplied for drinking water production. Water utilities and water-treatment practitioners were unprepared to effectively face the challenge of a growing high-quality water demand, especially in climate change scenarios. We need to think out of the box, creating multi-disciplinary panels of experts able to exploit the advances in chemistry, environmental engineering, and ICT to effectively join human health protection and economic and social development. In this sense, stakeholders’ involvement is essential to success.
This MOOC wants to communicate the challenge of protecting water and then human health from chemical and microbiological hazards, as well as the multidisciplinarity required by this challenge by providing some key elements about water quality, protection and remediation, sustainable drinking water production, online monitoring, and finally advanced computing for process control. Moreover, a broader perspective to investigate the experience of water supply will be introduced. For instance, participants will be invited to observe and understand people’s practices around drinking water, exploring approaches and tools derived from service and product design to support behavioral change. It fulfills SDG6, covering almost all its set targets, but also some relevant targets in SDG11, SDG12, and SGD15, considering the strict connection among safe water provision, robust cities/societies development, and sustainable consumption.

Syllabus

WEEK 1: The anthropic water cycle
WEEK 2: Water treatments
WEEK 3: Big data and advanced computing