by André

This year I attended the International Conference on Urban Health that took place, late September, in Coimbra. For this conference, organized by ISUH, Universidade de Coimbra and Elsevier, I presented my work on Material Flow Analysis of water and nitrogen in Maputo which is based on Iana’s MSc thesis.

Coimbra in the late afternoon.

Due to time constraints I could only attend one day of the conference – the day of my presentation – but I enjoyed it thoroughly. The day started with a parallel session, chaired by Sandy Cairncross, on “Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and health in informal settlements”, with Davide Berendes talking about his work in the SaniPath project project in Maputo (info here and here).

One of the best sessions of the day, the parallel session chaired by Sandy Cairncross.

In the afternoon I would highlight Plenary 3 and the presentations of Jason Coburn on community development projects in California, US; and Ricardo Baptista e Leite about health data gathering and analysis in the Municipality of Cascais, Portugal. Definitely two very interesting approaches.

My session was the last of the day but we still had a nearly full-house. I presented the latest findings on the nitrogen flows for the city of Maputo, since the final article is now under review I cannot go into a lot of detail but the calculations seem to show that the projected city-wide Masterplan which I have discussed before (here and here) will have little impact on the ongoing groundwater contamination with Nitrate. You can grab a copy of my presentation here. Finally, I have to say that I really enjoyed the conference, I learned a lot and made very good contacts – I’m definitely attending the next one.

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