Author and journalist Vijay Vaitheeswaran leads a panel of environmental policy experts dissecting the growing concern over water.
They discuss current inefficiencies and new sources of concern, exploring ways to more effectively distribute and use this increasingly precious resource.
Bio
Ken Caldeira
Ken Caldeira is an atmospheric scientist who works at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology. He researches ocean acidification, climate effects of trees, intentional climate modification, and interactions in the global carbon/climate system. He also works as a staff scientist for Intellectual Ventures, a Seattle-based invention and patent company headed up by Nathan Myhrvold.
Caldeira's work was featured in a November 2006 article in The New Yorker, entitled "The Darkening Sea." In 2007, he contributed two op-ed pieces on the subject of global warming to The New York Times. He was named a "Hero Scientist of 2008" by New Scientist magazine.
David Harrison
David Harrison is a practicing water resources lawyer in Boulder, Colorado, of counsel with the firm of Moses, Wittemyer, Harrison and Woodruff, P.C. He works as a consultant to The Nature Conservancy acting as senior advisor to the Global Freshwater Team, formerly the Freshwater Initiative, of which he was one of the co-founders.
In that connection, he leads the strategic group on Ecologically Sustainable Hydropower. He is currently focusing on the application of that approach at several demonstration projects including the YangtzeRiver Basin in China and the ZambeziRiver Basin in southern Africa. In addition, he is working with the International Hydropower Association in examining ways to transform global standards and practices for sustainable hydropower.
Peter Murdoch
Pete Murdoch is a Research Hydrologist with the Watershed Research Group of the US Geological Survey in Troy, New York. Since 1982 he has lead research projects on watershed biogeochemical processes, and the effects of acid rain and climate change on aquatic systems.
In the mid-1990s he served as the DOI representative to the White House Committee on Environmental and Natural Resources (CENR), and lead a pilot of a multi-agency collaborative assessment of the Delaware River based on the CENR 'Framework for Environmental Monitoring and Research". In 2004-06, Murdoch served as the DOI representative to an interagency committee that oversees the North American Carbon Program. He now is leading a multi-agency study on the effects of permafrost thawing on the hydrology, energy, and carbon budgets of the Yukon River Basin.
Michael P. Totten
Michael Totten has nearly three decades of professional work in promoting ecologically sustainable economic development at the local, national and international levels.
At Conservation International's Center for Environmental Leadership in Business (CELB), he focuses on engaging the business sector in opportunities to shrink the ecological footprints of their operations and products and advising them on ways to take action to offset these footprints with positive steps, such as preserving threatened biodiversity habitat.
Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran
Vijay Vaitheeswaran is an award-winning correspondent for The Economist. In his 19 years at the Economist, he has covered energy and the environment, innovation, health, and biotechnology. In fall of this year, he'll open the magazine's first Shanghai bureau and become its China business editor. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, with Iain Carson, and Power to the People. His next book, Need, Greed, and Speed, on the future of global innovation, will be previewed at the World Economic Forum's meeting in Davos and released in March 2012. Vaitheeswaran is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an adviser to the Clinton Global Initiative, and chairman of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Sustainable Energy. He teaches at NYU's Stern Business School and serves as chairman of The Economist's conference series on innovation, the Ideas Economy.
member. 
