Pieter van der Zaag is professor of integrated water resources management at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in Delft, The Netherlands, and also holds a professorship at Delft University of Technology. He chairs the Water Management Group.
Pieter has worked in Africa and Mexico from 1982 to 2003. He has special interests in agricultural water management, water allocation issues in catchment areas and in the management of transboundary river basins, on which he has published widely. Pieter is fascinated by the dynamic relationship between biophysical and social processes when managing water, and in understanding patterns of cooperation over water.
The following are Pieter’s current main research interests:
- The role of inequality and heterogeneity in enduring water institutions
- Harnessing water by smallholders from nature-based storage in (semi-)arid regions in Africa
- Water allocation tools in river basins – developing dynamic water value maps
- Water allocation in large irrigation systems – supporting canal operators with mobile model predictive control and earth observation techniques.
Pieter has a track record of formulating and guiding major interdisciplinary research and capacity building projects, including in Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Mexico, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.
