I also have a website at IHE Delft
Agricultural water management, equitable water allocation in catchment areas and the management of transboundary river basins are topics of great relevance to me. I am fascinated by the dynamic relationship between biophysical and social processes when managing water, which I try to describe and analyse (see the publications that I wrote together with students and colleagues).
I like to engage with interdisciplinary action research and capacity building projects, such as in Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, South Africa and Vietnam, and have also lived and worked in Mozambique, Mexico, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
Recently I convened the high-level workshop entitled “From the delta looking up… Sharing lessons of downstream countries on transboundary water cooperation” held at the maritime MuZEEum, Vlissingen, The Netherlands, September 12 – 14, 2018, which resulted in the “Zeeland call to action”.
We are also engaged in action research (A4Labs and the associated NaBWIG project), that envisages to facilitate smallholder farmers to access shallow groundwater from sand rivers in drylands of Africa (see the above photo). With a team of collaborators we’ve made a short video on youtube, and introduced the Adaptive Investment Pathways concept. See for recent publications the sand rivers page of this site, and our sandrivers.org website.
Currently, I am professor of water resources management at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education and at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. See some of my lectures and presentations. I also have the great pleasure of accompanying a great group of talented Master and PhD researchers (see the list of PhD fellows). I loved the years that I taught at the University of Zimbabwe between 1993 and 2003, when I was involved in helping to set up a regional Southern African network of university institutes with expertise in water-related fields, WaterNet.
I am also associate editor of the Water Policy journal and member of the editorial board of Hydrology and Earth System Sciences. I studied irrigation engineering at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and obtained my PhD degree on a study of irrigation management in Mexico.
✉ pietervanderzaag(at)gmail(dot)com
Pieter van der Zaag 