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Yoshihide Wada

Program Director and Principal Research Scholar

Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program

Biography

Prof. Dr. Yoshihide Wada is the Program Director of the IIASA Biodiversity and Natural Resources (BNR) Program. Additionally, he holds a joint appointment as a Chair Professor of Global Water and Food Security at the Department of Physical Geography, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

Prof. Dr. Wada obtained his PhD degree with distinction (Cum Laude) at Utrecht University in October 2013. His completed PhD projects include estimating global water use and water availability by using a global hydrological and water resources model. His work also includes estimating and projecting global water scarcity and assessing the sustainability of global groundwater resources. Some of his work has appeared in Nature, Nature Geoscience, Nature Climate Change, and PNAS.

He currently leads and coordinates strategic science development at the program and his current research projects include a global assessment of sustainable solutions achieving SDGs under socioeconomic and climate change and increasing water scarcity, the Water Futures and Solutions (WFaS) initiative, the inter-sectoral climate change impacts assessments (ISIpedia), supporting risk assessment and adaptation at multiple spatial scales (COMICC), the European Climate Prediction system (EUCP) and Food-water-energy for Urban Sustainable Environments (FUSE).

He has participated in and led a number of international projects including the European GLOWASIS (Global Water Scarcity Information Service) Project, ISI-MIP (Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project), LandMIP (Land Modelling Intercomparison Project), World Resources Institute (WRI) Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, and EartH2Observe (Global Earth Observation for Integrated Water Resource Assessment). He has also been involved in in the Fifth and Sixth Assessment Report (AR5/6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Working Group I/II). He is also a lead author of the UNEP GEO-6 (Global Environmental Outlook) for Freshwater.

He has been the recipient of the Horton (Hydrology) Research Grant by the American Geophysical Union (AGU; 2012), European Geoscience Union (EGU) Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scientists (2018) as well as American Geophysical Union (AGU) Hydrologic Science Early Career Award (2018). He has also been awarded the prestigious Hydrological Award from the Dutch Hydrological Society (NHV; 2017), the NICE STEP (NISTEP) Award from Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT) and National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (2017), and the Young Scientist Prize from the MEXT (2018).

Prof. Dr. Wada has been invited to over 220 conferences worldwide. He is an (associate) editor of Water Resources Research (AGU), Environmental Research Communications (ERC), One Earth (Cell Press) and Hydrological Research Letters. Prof. Dr. Wada has (co)authored about 230 publications, 150 of which appeared in international peer-reviewed journals. The citation of these peer-reviewed papers exceeds 2300 each year. He has been selected as a highly cited researcher (top 1%) by Web of Science/Scopus.

Last update: 05 JAN 2021

Publications

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Guillaumot, L. , Smilovic, M. , Burek, P. , de Bruijn, J. , Greve, P., Kahil, T. , & Wada, Y. (2022). Coupling a large-scale hydrological model (CWatM v1.1) with a high-resolution groundwater flow model (MODFLOW 6) to assess the impact of irrigation at regional scale. Geoscientific Model Development 15 (18) 7099-7120. 10.5194/gmd-15-7099-2022.

Chrysafi, A., Virkki, V., Jalava, M., Sandström, V., Piipponen, J., Porkka, M., Lade, S.J., La Mere, K., Wang-Erlandsson, L., Scherer, L., Andersen, L.S., Bennett, E., Brauman, K.A., Cooper, G.S., De Palma, A., Döll, P., Downing, A.S., DuBois, T.C., Fetzer, I., Fulton, E.A., Gerten, D., Jaafar, H., Jägermeyr, J., Jaramillo, F., Jung, M., Kahiluoto, H., Lassaletta, L., Mackay, A.W., Mason-D’Croz, D., Mekonnen, M.M., Nash, K.L., Pastor, A.V., Ramankutty, N., Ridoutt, B., Siebert, S., Simmons, B.I., Staal, A., Sun, Z., Tobian, A., Usubiaga-Liaño, A., van der Ent, R.J., van Soesbergen, A., Verburg, P.H., Wada, Y. , Zipper, S., & Kummu, M. (2022). Quantifying Earth system interactions for sustainable food production via expert elicitation. Nature Sustainability 5 830-842. 10.1038/s41893-022-00940-6.

Satoh, Y., Yoshimura, K., Pokhrel, Y., Kim, H., Shiogama, H., Yokohata, T., Hanasaki, N., Wada, Y. , Burek, P. , Byers, E. , Müller Schmied, H., Gerten, D., Ostberg, S., Gosling, S.N., Boulange, J.E.S., & Oki, T. (2022). The timing of unprecedented hydrological drought under climate change. Nature Communications 13 (1) e3287. 10.1038/s41467-022-30729-2.

Hunt, J. , Nascimento, A., Guzman, O.J.R., Furtado, G.C.D.A., ten Caten, C.S., Tomé, F.M.C., Leal Filho, W., Đurin, B., Lopes, M., & Wada, Y. (2022). Sedimentary Basin Water and Energy Storage: A Low Environmental Impact Option for the Bananal Basin. Energies 15 (12) e4498.

Yao, T., Bolch, T., Chen, D., Gao, J., Immerzeel, W., Piao, S., Su, F., Thompson, L., Wada, Y. , Wang, L., Wang, T., Wu, G., Xu, B., Yang, W., Zhang, G., & Zhao, P. (2022). The imbalance of the Asian water tower. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 10.1038/s43017-022-00299-4.