Panel: Navigating Uncertainty in the Post-2030 Agenda, SENSE-IHE PhD Symposium. 22 October 2025

Описание: Panel Discussion: Navigating Uncertainty in the Post-2030 Agenda

Moderated by: Henry Amorocho Daza & Maria Gabriela Castrellon Romero PhD Candidates, IHE Delft

A threefold approach to rescue the 2030 Agenda from failing, by Dr. Prajal Pradhan, Assistant Professor, University of Groningen

Countries are not on track to meet the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that calls for transformative changes to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path. The 2030 Agenda comprises 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030, balancing the three sustainability dimensions—social, economic, and environmental. So far, SDGs have had a limited transformative impact because of their selective implementation without considering their complex interactions. SDGs interact positively (i.e. synergies) or negatively (i.e. trade-offs) depending on context- and location-specific mechanisms. Failing to meet SDGs will negatively affect the lives of billions of people and worsen socioeconomic and environmental crises. The COVID pandemic has decelerated or reversed the process of the 2030 Agenda. Therefore, the next few years are crucial to accelerate SDG progress and adopt a post-2030 Agenda or a follow-up of SDGs. This perspective proposes three research avenues with a threefold scientific approach to address these urgent needs. The research avenues comprise systematic prioritization of SDGs instead of cherry-picking, understanding linkages between SDGs and sustainability, and co-creating a science-based post-2030 Agenda.

Hydroinformatics: the path from uncertainty to resilience, by Prof. Ioana Popescu Professor of Hydroinformatics, IHE Delft

Too much water brings floods. Too little brings droughts. Pipes and canals can also fail. All this brings uncertainty, due to unpredictable floods, prolonged droughts, or shifting rainfall driven by climate change. Societies struggle to forecast and manage these natural variations, and methods for decision making need to add to these dimensions the growing complexity of environmental and social systems as well. The path to address this challenge is the interdisciplinary field of hydroinformatics. It is a field that originally developed from computational hydraulics, where numerical modeling and simulation were used to better understand water flows. Over time, hydroinformatics expanded beyond hydraulic computations to integrate data science, hydrology, climate modelling, and information technology. This evolution transformed it into a powerful framework to address uncertainty. By adding to this framework real-time data, remote sensing, machine learning, and participatory platforms, hydroinformatics links the physical behavior of water with human systems and decision-making. These tools help communities and policymakers anticipate floods or droughts, optimize resource allocation, and plan adaptive responses to climate impacts. In doing so, hydroinformatics shifts the focus from hazard event management to resilience building—enabling societies to prepare and adapt. It redefines water management as a collaborative and adaptive process, where data, technology, and people come together to create resilient futures shaped by both knowledge and care for the environment.

The 2025 SENSE-IHE PhD Symposium was organized and hosted by the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education and the SENSE Research School, and co-funded by Dutch Research Council (NWO). With the theme ‘From Uncertainty to Resilience: Data, Climate and Society’, the Symposium invited participants to reflect on how to transform uncertainty from a barrier into a driving force for building more adaptive, inclusive, and robust pathways to sustainability. The Symposium aimed to ground theoretical reflections in practical strategies, focusing on three interrelated domains: data, climate, and society.