Yoshihide Wada

Yoshihide Wada is a principal research scholar in the Water Security Research Group of the IIASA Biodiversity and Natural Resources (BNR) Program. Additionally, he holds joint appointments as a Chair Professor of Global Water and Food Security at the Department of Physical Geography, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and Professor of the Climate and Livability Initiative at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia.

Wada obtained his PhD degree with distinction (Cum Laude) at Utrecht University in October 2013. His completed PhD projects include estimating global water use and water availability by using a global hydrological and water resources model. His work also includes estimating and projecting global water scarcity and assessing the sustainability of global groundwater resources. Some of his work has appeared in Nature, Nature Geoscience, Nature Climate Change, and PNAS.

At IIASA, he led and coordinated strategic science development in the former Water Program and in the BNR Program respectively. His research projects include a global assessment of sustainable solutions for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under socioeconomic and climate change and increasing water scarcity, the Water Futures and Solutions (WFaS) initiative, the inter-sectoral climate change impacts assessments (ISIpedia), supporting risk assessment and adaptation at multiple spatial scales (COMICC), the European Climate Prediction system (EUCP), and Food-water-energy for Urban Sustainable Environments (FUSE).

In addition, he has participated in and led a number of international projects including the European Global Water Scarcity Information Service (GLOWASIS) Project, the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP), the Land Modeling Intercomparison Project (LandMIP), the World Resources Institute (WRI) Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, and the Global Earth Observation for Integrated Water Resource Assessment (EartH2Observe) Project. He has also been involved in the Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports (AR5/6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Working Group I/II) and is a lead author of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-6) for Freshwater.

He has been the recipient of the Horton (Hydrology) Research Grant by the American Geophysical Union (AGU; 2012), the European Geoscience Union (EGU) Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scientists (2018), as well as the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Hydrologic Science Early Career Award (2018). He has also been awarded the prestigious Hydrological Award from the Dutch Hydrological Society (NHV; 2017), the NICE STEP (NISTEP) Award from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT) and the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (2017), and the Young Scientist Prize from the MEXT (2018).

Wada has been invited to over 220 conferences worldwide. He is an (associate) editor of the journals Water Resources Research (AGU), Environmental Research Communications (ERC), One Earth (Cell Press), and Hydrological Research Letters. He has (co)authored about 300 publications, 200 of which appeared in international peer-reviewed journals. The citations of these peer-reviewed papers exceed 6500 each year. He has been selected as a highly cited researcher (top 1%) by Web of Science/Scopus.


Last update: 02 FEB 2023