Advances in Groundwater Governance

Karen Villholth is Principal Researcher within Groundwater Management stationed at the IWMI-Southern Africa Office in Pretoria, South Africa since 2012. Her keen interest in groundwater for development has prompted her to do research, consultancy and capacity building related to groundwater management and in particular groundwater use and management for agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Also, she has worked on groundwater resilience and vulnerability to climate change as well as to extreme events, like the 2004 Asian tsunami. She also works on transboundary aquifer mapping, benefit sharing and management. She is Chair of the Danish National Chapter of the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH) and a co-founding member of the IAH Commission on Groundwater for Decision Makers. She has more than twenty years of professional experience, has edited three books related to groundwater management, besides a significant number of publications in international high-ranking journals. She holds a Ph.D. on flow and transport processes in soil and groundwater from the Technical University of Denmark. She was previously with the Geological Survey of Denmark, and prior to that DHI as well as with IWMI, working from the Head Quarter‘s office in Sri Lanka.

Elena Lopez-Gunn is Founder and Manager of ICATALIST. She is also an associate Professor at IE Business school, before she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Water Observatory at the Botin Foundation. She was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics where she worked as an Alcoa Research Fellow. Dr Elena Lopez-Gunn finished her PhD at King's College, London in 2004. She also has a Masters from the University of Cambridge. Professionally, Elena has collaborated with a UNESCO Working Group to develop indicators on groundwater use across the world. She has also acted as for the UK's Environment Agency and for UNDP, and for Transparency International-Spanish Chapter. She has published on a range of issues mainly related with innovation, partnership models, public policy and knowledge management.

Jac van der Gun is groundwater hydrologist. One year with a water supply company in The Netherlands was followed by four years of employment by UNDTCD in water resources assessment activities in Bolivia. Then he joined the Institute of Applied Geoscience of the R&D organisation TNO (Applied Scientific Research) in The Netherlands, where he remained employed until retirement. At TNO, Jac van der Gun participated and took responsibility for the Groundwater Reconnaissance of The Netherlands. He became also involved in the international water resources assessment and management projects of the institute, such as water resources assessment projects in Yemen and Paraguay, and he carried out numerous short missions in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe for various international and national organisations, providing scientific-technical inputs, supervising projects, formulating projects and programmes, or evaluating these. Jac van der Gun was actively involved in establishing the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre, of which he became the first director in 2003. Currently, he is still active in several groundwater related projects of international organisations, mostly as a consultant to UNESCO or to UNESCO-IGRAC.