Dr. Christian Klassert

Nearly a billion people live in cities with unreliable public water supplies. As a consequence, people face inequalities in access to tap water and depend on often costly alternative water sources such as informal markets which use tanker lorries to supply drinking water from the surrounding areas. In the course of climate change and urbanisation, these challenges will leave their mark on the daily lives of more and more people in cities. However, before now too little research has been done on how unequal and insecure access to tap water and dependence on alternative water sources affects urban water security.

The goal of my research stay at the Earth Science System Department at Stanford University was to combine coupled human-natural systems (CHANS) models with existing empirical data as a way of investigating these questions. CHANS models have previously been used to identify concealed water shortages in river catchment areas. The Water Resources and Hydrogeology Group run by my host Professor Gorelick has two CHANS models, one for Jordan and one for the Upper Bhima Basin in India, the development of which I had contributed through earlier projects. Through my research stay I was able to adapt and apply these models in direct cooperation with Professor Gorelick’s team to analyse urban water security under unequal and insecure access to tap water. This study was particularly relevant due to a series of urban water crises in cities such as Cape Town, Chennai and Amman in recent years. This was added to by the UN’s first major conference on water in almost half a century, which took place in 2023.

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View of Stanford University campus from the balcony of the Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment & Energy building, known as Y2E2.

My research stay gave me the chance to work closely with Professor Gorelick and his team and to present my research to other hydrology and economics working groups at Stanford University. My research findings have also been included in two conference presentations and an article published in the prestigious Nature Sustainability journal. Further publications will follow.

In general terms, my academic work aims to better understand the extent to which future drought and water shortage situations will exceed our water demands and supplies, and how far these situations will push our existing distribution mechanisms to their limits. As part of this I am using hydro-economic models to investigate urban and agricultural water demand through case studies which include Germany, India and Jordan. My work during the research stay has helped me improve and expand my analytical methods, particularly with regard to the role played by inequality in water security in cities. The insights and experiences I gained thanks to the support of a KSB Stiftung Scholarship from the DAAD-Stiftung are now proving very helpful for the design of ongoing modelling projects, such as a cooperation between the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and the federal state of Thuringia to investigate water shortages. The results I achieved and my publications form an important element in my academic profile and have opened up new opportunities for project applications which I have submitted since then.

Preparing for my stay

Preparations for my stay started several months in advance with a fairly time-consuming visa application and looking for somewhere to live. My stay would not have been possible without the family funding from the KSB Stiftung Scholarship which allowed my wife and children to accompany me. This meant I also needed to find a place in a kindergarten. Stanford and the neighbouring city of Palo Alto are in the wealthy Silicon Valley, which made finding an apartment particularly challenging.

Luckily I was able to call upon the support of Professor Gorelick and a former project colleague. Based on his own experience, my former colleague recommended the district of Potrero Hill in San Francisco as a good place to live, from where you can get to Palo Alto in 40 minutes by train. Professor Gorelick recommended a flat-searching website for academic stays, and through this we were able to rent an apartment from a Stanford lecturer for the time we were there. She has children of her own, so she was able to give us helpful tips on where to find a kindergarten. Two months before departure the key organisational preparations were in place and nothing could get in the way of our visit.

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A morning trip on the Caltrain to Palo Alto.

The story of our stay

Straight after arriving at Stanford, Professor Gorelick welcomed me with a friendly tour of the campus, ending with my desk in the postdoc and PhD students’ room of the Water Resources and Hydrogeology Group. This large room held over 20 individual office spaces, and it was here that I met new colleagues and team members who I already knew from a joint project. There were people from many different countries including China, France, Italy, Iran, Colombia and South Korea among Steve’s team and other office colleagues. This provided an exciting mixture of perspectives on many topics, both academic and everyday. Thanks to the very warm welcome I immediately felt at home in my new office. At the end of my first day there, we had a meal to celebrate a colleague’s birthday. Over the following days, I was invited to various talks and events on campus, and was gradually able to get to know various relevant working groups.

For the analytical elements of my research while in California, I was able to draw on a partnership with another PhD student who was also using CHANS model analyses of the Upper Bhima Basin, and also on discussions with Professor Gorelick and several other postdocs who were working on related research topics. The first step in investigating water security in the city of Pune in the Upper Bhima Basin was to create a detailed CHANS model of the supply situation for water user agents. To do this I used data which had been collected through a survey of 1900 households in the city and data from water pressure measurements in the distribution network. I also needed to use urban growth models to project spatial population development.

Analyses of the CHANS models for the Upper Bhima Basin and Jordan aligned with survey data shows that a significant part of the urban populations experience water stress during months of water scarcity (defined as having access to less than 50 litres per capita per day). By examining inequality in water supplies for the city of Pune, I showed that conventional aggregate observations have seriously underestimated the challenges which the city faces concerning water security. By 2050, a third of the urban population could experience water stress during drought years, despite average households still having access to more than 100 litres per capita per day. Our survey data shows that water stress of this kind causes heavy use of alternative sources such as springs and tanker supplies, which will also make water supplies more expensive and energy-intensive in future. In the case of Jordan, I carried out more detailed analyses of the markets for water deliveries to cities from their surrounding areas.

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My desk in the Postdocs and PhD students room in the Water Resources and Hydrogeology Group in the Braun Corner building.

I have presented the results of this analysis to three working groups in Stanford and at interna-tional conferences in Chicago and Vienna. First of all, Professor Sarah Fletcher invited me to present my early findings in her lab at Stanford. This was an exciting opportunity, as her team is investigating related questions in a Californian case study. After that presentation I regularly attended meetings of the group, which resulted in plans for a joint publication comparing the impacts of water access inequalities across various case studies, amongst other things. Through Professor Gorelick I was also invited to become a regular attendee at the SEEPAC Research Lunch hosted by the distinguished environmental economists Larry Goulder and Charles Kolstad, where I got to present my analyses of Jordanian water markets. Lastly, I even had the chance to present my analyses as a guest speaker at Professor Gorelick’s Winter Hydro Seminar Series, which draw a wide audience of university members from various faculties. Interacting with different working groups helped me greatly in understanding what makes my research particularly relevant from different perspectives such as hydrology, environmental economics and hydro-economics. It also helped me to expand and refine my questions, analytical methods and how I present my results by focusing more closely on topics such as distribution equity, supply security and water affordability.

In late October 2022 an editor from the BBC World Service asked me to do an interview on water security in Jordan for the Newshour programme, which was broadcast in the US by Na-tional Public Radio. In December I joined members of Professor Gorelick’s working group to attend the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Chicago, where I presented my initial analyses of urban water security in the Upper Bhima Basin in public for the first time. This spring I gave a presentation via video link on more results of my analysis to the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna

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Presentation at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Chicago, 14 December 2022.

In January 2023 Professor Gorelick and I learned that a collaborative manuscript on Jordanian water markets which I had submitted to the prestigious journal Nature Sustainability had a chance of being published (Klassert et al., 2023; see list of publications below). Working closely with Professor Gorelick, I took up the suggestion by reviewers of the manuscript to analyse the future role of these largely informal markets in urban water supplies, and the impacts of a range of policy interventions. My investigations for this manuscript show that almost eleven times as much water is purchased on these markets than had previously been as-sumed. One major finding of our policy analysis was that even the largest seawater desalina-tion projects ever considered would have almost no impact on demand for water deliveries as long as public water supplies remain as unreliable and unequal as they have been until now.

Working in direct partnership with Professor Gorelick’s team over a longer period of time allowed me to improve my skills in modelling and analysis, and when I faced complex problems with programming and optimisation I could always talk to someone with a detailed knowledge of the subject. Sharing ideas with other outstanding working groups at Stanford helped me to broaden my perspective on my work and identify connections with other research strands. These various interactions gave rise to plans for joint publications and possible project proposals.

Personal impressions of daily life as a researcher and at home

Previous project meetings had given me the chance to get to know Stanford and the Bay Area, but these made nowhere near as much of an impression as the much fuller experience of my daily life in my research and at home with my family during my stay. Many personal and professional experiences left a great impression on me, and I hope to be able to take some of them back into my life in Germany. During my stay I really came to value the extremely respectful and empathic communication style which I not only encountered at the university but also often in my day-to-day activities outside work. While I certainly feel more ‘at home’ in more ‘direct’ forms of conversation, as time went on I realised how pleasant it can be when communication at work is almost entirely conflict-free. Another very positive aspect for me was realising how treating one another with such a high degree of politeness makes it easier to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

In terms of working style, I was impressed by the high degree of goal orientation and independence that even PhD students display. Almost every lecture I attended during my stay made a compelling case for the urgency and importance of the work behind it. I of course found this very inspiring and it led to some fascinating discussions. At the same time, when set against my very independent research at Stanford, I have come to greatly appreciate the highly collaborative work on common topics in my day-to-day academic work at UFZ.

Stanford has a beautiful campus and the largely good weather made it an extremely pleasant place to work. The university staff are very international, so there were fewer cultural barriers than I had expected. I enjoyed quickly striking up a good personal relationship even with members of Professor Gorelick’s team and we were planning games evenings and excursions before the first few days were up. These also allowed my family to get to know my colleagues well.

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My children exploring the Potrero Hill district in San Francisco.

Our stay was also a positive and formative experience for my wife and children. Of course, it first meant adapting to a completely new situation. My wife is a project manager in education and she was able to cut down to part-time for the duration of our stay. Still, staying in California meant a lot of video conferences, some of which took place very early due to the time difference. Our children started a preparatory English course at their nursery in Leipzig six months before we set off in order to give them a certain level of preparation for the language. Nonetheless, my wife and I weren’t sure how our children would cope from day to day in a kindergarten where German was not spoken. When we got there, though, it quickly became clear that they both got on fine and their teachers were able to interpret their needs without any problems despite not sharing a language. Our children attended a bilingual kindergarten in The Mission, a multicultural district, which meant they were not only faced with English, but Spanish as well. The kindergarten was set up through a parents’ initiative which includes the idea of involving parents in its educational plans. Once a month my wife and I attended an evening seminar on various topics to do with education and teaching. My wife also helped the teachers look after the children once a week. Seeing how they valued diversity and multilingualism was a valuable experience for the children, my wife and me. We were also impressed by the attentive, creative and caring style of education and learned a lot about dealing with children.

We also loved the Bay Area of San Francisco and the regions around it. Potrero Hill has great transport connections and a relatively large part of the population commutes to Silicon Valley. Despite this, the district had a really pleasant neighbourhood atmosphere which was evident at times like Hallowe’en when the houses were decorated impressively. San Francisco’s different districts are incredibly varied, so there was a lot for our children and us to discover. At weekends the surrounding area offered many great options for excursions to the nearby giant redwood forests, the coast and Yosemite National Park.

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Family trip to Dolores Park in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Conclusions

Everything about this research stay was an incredibly enriching experience which has expanded my horizons and moved me forwards a long way in my academic work. I would like to thank the DAAD-Stiftung for giving me this opportunity to enjoy so many formative experiences in just six months and to acquire new skills. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to Professor Steve Gorelick and his team for their warm welcome. Lastly, I am particularly grateful for the family funding included in my scholarship. If I had not been able to go on this stay with my family, I would not have been able to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity. To my wife and children I would like to say thank you for putting up with all the changes which a stay like this demands in addition to its enjoyable aspects. This stay allowed me to conduct research and publish articles which have already proved very valuable to my ongoing academic work. I hope the new research threads which I have picked up, and the new contacts and friendships I have made will stay with me for a long time to come.

Reference entries:

(1) Jaeger et al. (2017), PNAS, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1706847114.

(2) UNESCO (2023), UN Water Development Report, Foreword, p. vii, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000384655.

(3) “Food water energy for Urban Sustainable Environments” (FUSE), siehe: https://fuse.stanford.edu/.

(4) Karutz, Klassert and Kabisch (2023), https://doi.org/10.3390/land12051051.

(5) Episode from 22/10/2022: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w172yfc6sc6msxm.

Appendix: Publications and lectures from the research project

Klassert, C., Yoon, J., Sigel, K., Klauer, B., Talozi, S., Lachaut, T., Selby, P., Knox, S., Avisse, N., Tilmant, A., Harou, J., Mustafa, D., Meddelin-Azuara, J., Bataineh, B., Zhang, H., Gawel, E., Gorelick, S.M. (2023). Unexpected growth of an illegal water market. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01177-7

Klassert, C., Wang, A., Jain Figueroa, A., Zhu, Y., Karutz, R., Zozmann, H., Klauer, B. Gawel, E. & Gorelick S.M. (2023). Assessing urban water insecurity under access inequality-coupled human-natural systems analyses in the Upper Bhima Basin, India. Presentation at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2023, 24.-28. April 2023, Vienna, Austria (hybrid event). Abstract online (20. Mai 2023): https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-14555

Klassert, C., Figueroa, A.J.F., Zhu, Y., Karutz, R., Zozmann, H., Klauer, B., Gawel, E., & Gorelick S.M. (2022). Hidden water scarcity due to access inequality–coupled human-natural systems analyses in the Upper Bhima Basin, India. Vortrag beim American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2022, 12.-16. December 2022, Chicago, IL, USA. Abstract online (20. Mai 2023): https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022AGUFM.H35F..05K/abstract