Arjen Y. Hoekstra: A Water Management Researcher to Be Remembered

The research interests of Arjen had a consistent direction throughout his career, starting as a Ph.D. student in 1993 at Delft University of Technology and working at the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM, Bilthoven, the Netherlands), as senior researcher at the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft, as full professor at the University of Twente and as visiting professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. In his Ph.D. thesis, Perspectives on Water: An Integrated Model-based Exploration of the Future [1], Arjen studied how cultural perspectives may drive countries or regions to adopt fundamentally different strategies to deal with water-related problems, how these perspectives translate in very different indicators of what good water management is, and how plausible future global development pathways may diverge under altering adherence of perspectives. Arjen highly valued critical discussion on the definition and interpretation of indicators, emphasizing that water footprints reflect environmental pressures and human appropriations of water resources, but do not directly reflect environmental impacts [19], highlighting differences in insight with how the LCA community adopted water footprints in a sharp open academic debate [20,21]. In his latest book The water footprint of modern consumer society [26], he highlighted main drivers of water consumption (chapter The meat eater, a big water user), the relevance of supply-chain thinking (chapter The supply-chain water footprint of paper).