The Berkeley Water Center’s mission is to create more resilient, equitable, and sustainable water systems with access to safe water and sanitation for all. We leverage Berkeley research to accelerate groundbreaking solutions for the world’s water problems.
The Berkeley Water Center pursues this mission by focusing on the following priorities: research, engagement and outreach, and education and community.
We cultivate, facilitate and support a broad range of interdisciplinary research projects to address local and global water challenges. We convene diverse teams to understand current issues and collaboratively innovate to prevent future water crises.
Our faculty, post docs and graduate students conduct research across multiple disciplines at the University of California Berkeley, the Berkeley National Laboratory and with partner institutions around the world pursuing studies in water and promoting water-related research in public health, water infrastructure, engineering, natural resource management, agriculture, economics and law.
We empower UC Berkeley students with opportunities, skills, and resources to develop innovative ideas and to become water leaders. We create a vibrant, interdisciplinary research community of students, faculty and staff working on water-related research. We also encourage access to water-related science, technology and engineering curriculum in area schools.
We foster partnerships, build connections and facilitate collaboration among academia, policy-makers, and practitioners to enable research-driven solutions to emergent water challenges. We translate research results for a wide audience of policy-makers, practitioners, and the public to better inform decision-making about water system planning and development. We promote and amplify research results so that they may have a greater impact outside of academia.
The Berkeley Water Center is supported by the College of Engineering. Its affiliates work across the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and have a broad range of water-related research interests and expertise, spanning drinking water, sanitation, technologies and infrastructure, ecosystems and hydrology, policy and economics, planning and management, international development, and California water.