Sustainable water resources to support global communities

Managing our water resources is key to maximizing social wellbeing, economic welfare, and sustainable ecosystems. York has built a space for passionate individuals to come together in pursuit of a future where everyone has access to this essential part of life.

Researchers in the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University are working to create a sustainable water future, whether it be drinking water, groundwater, stormwater, or wastewater.

The overall aim is to improve social equity, by improving access to clean water to improve social well-being, to ensure that our water resources provide economic benefits to communities, and to help sustain aquatic ecosystems by improving water quality.

Here are some of the ways our teams of researchers and students are helping increase access to sustainable water resources:

• Creating tools and new technologies to ensure the availability of safe and affordable water in small, Indigenous, refugee communities, as well as in our cities.
• Advancing remediation technologies to improve the quality of groundwater, a significant source of freshwater in the world.
• Investigating the effects of microplastics, an emerging threat to marine and aquatic ecosystems, with the goal to trace and ultimately protect our water supplies.
• Measuring the role of green infrastructure to manage stormwater runoff in cities, which will not only help reduce the risk of floods, but also provide communities with access to public spaces.
• Deploying artificial intelligence methods to help predict floods and to design infrastructure needed to support water management in our communities.
• Developing new technologies to recover and extract resources, like energy and nutrients, from our wastewater, following the principles of the circular economy.