Future H2O is helping create that future through solutions-oriented research and implementation partnerships with the world’s biggest corporations, NGOs, transboundary multinationals, venture funds and public institutions.
1. Finding opportunity
Future H2O identifies the biggest opportunities for ingenuity that water offers us, such as:
2. Co-creating solutions
We match ASU’s most creative researchers and policy and legal experts with some of the world’s most influential organizations — from Coca-Cola to The Nature Conservancy to the US State Department — to create solutions for water abundance that can scale to the world stage.
3. Communicating water abundance
We advance new narratives of water abundance through thought leadership and the reach of ASU, named most innovative university in the United States by U.S. News and World Report.
Read Future H2O opinions and Q&As at our Medium site
Goals
Outcome
A pipeline of water leaders that collaborate across sector boundaries and at scales that accelerate the path to water security
Goals
Outcome
A visual, global database that identifies opportunities for the public and private sector to collaborate on water security.
Goal
Harness distributed computing and ever-increasing streams of big water data to better manage water resources at scale from individual building operations to watersheds
Outcomes
Goal
Design a narrative and shape markets to enable economic growth while reducing water use
Outcome
Improved commercial, industrial and institutional water use efficiency through a lead-by-example approach, harnessing sensor test beds at ASU and leveraging relationships with the private sector valley-wide
Goals
Outcome
A testbed and core USAID performance evaluation center that offers transferable lessons and scalable solutions
John Sabo is a professor of river ecology and water resources in the School of Life Sciences and founding director of Future H2O in the Arizona State University Knowledge Enterprise. He is also a senior sustainability scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, a fellow in the Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society, an honors faculty in the Barrett Honors College, and serves on the graduate faculty in the Hydrosystems Engineering Graduate Program.
Sabo is a river food web ecologist and has designed and implemented large-scale field experiments to understand the role of aquatic-terrestrial energy flow on terrestrial food web dynamics as well as the dynamic effects of groundwater on surface water food webs. His research has been published in top journals including Ecology, Ecological Monographs, Ecology Letters, Global Change Biology, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, PNAS, and Science.
Sabo has also developed quantitative, data-driven methods to connect hydrology to freshwater fisheries and aspects of riverine biodiversity. His work in this realm is driven by a desire to understand how to better manage basin scale flows in rivers ranging from the Colorado, the Mekong and the Amazon. He received his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000.