Pressing topics in the Belgian water sector anno 2015

•Discussions on hot water topics took place amongst Belgian water professionals.•The demand for water-related IT knowledge is increasing.•There is a need for improved trans-disciplinary education.•There is a need for improved cross-sector communication.

Today’s water sector is governed by some hot topics, and this is no different in Belgium. As for the International Water Association (IWA), the goal of its Belgian division (B-IWA) is to gather different stakeholders, i.e. academics, policy makers and people from industry active in the (Belgian) water sector and trigger the debate. In May 2015, a first Nocturnal was organised to accomplish just this. Seven hot water topics, proposed by participants at the time of their online registration, were addressed in rotating round table discussions. These topics included resource recovery, micropollutants, water scarcity, hydroinformatics, integrated water management and modeling, technology vs. legislation and Computational Fluid Dynamics in water applications. The lively discussions led to the idea of this short contribution describing the outcomes of these round table discussions, along with some additional research on the topics. Main conclusions include the need for education (both of scholars and young professionals), inter-domain communication and the growing importance of IT in the water sector.

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