Hydraulics

Water has always been vital for the planet and several civilizations...

have developed along rivers. Nowadays water is still vital but it is also threatened. In fact, climate change together with population growth and fast urbanisation is placing an enormous strain on water supplies, drainage networks and sanitation network, besides generating violent flooding.

Hydraulic engineering has the difficult task to support the environmental sustainability of human interventions by considering that water is a valuable but also very fragile resource. At the same time, because of the climate change, water might be really powerful and generate dramatic situations of flooding when interacts with the delicate geological conditions as it is witnessed in several cases.

In such respect decision making depends in this specific domain on a number of factors such as climate, geology, geotechnics, urbanisation, social and economic aspects. All those aspects affect the water supply and the water use as well as the management of the water resources which has to consider, among others, economic development, risks and protection of environment.