ProfPierre Mukheibir

Pierre is a professionally registered civil engineer with 30 years experience in the water and sanitation sector. He has worked across urban water planning in both technical and research capacities. Before joining the Institute for Sustainable Futures, Pierre worked for three years as a senior planning engineer with an Australian water utility.

He currently leads research in the ISF Water Futures program, with a specific focus on options analysis related to water supply and demand planning, including drought response strategies, using multi-criteria decision support frameworks and those that aim to improve the understanding of institutional issues for green-grey infrastructure. He is a keen champion of urban sensitive water planning and restorative infrastructure strategies - adopting a One Water approach.

More recently he has collaborated with industry partners to develop decision making frameworks at the both at the strategy and the local servicing planning levels, that aim to incorporate the multiple objectives that planners seeking to achieve with responding to future uncertainties. He has developed a number of practical processes for making sense of the often competing objectives and using possible future states to test the portfolio of options for robustness and flexibility. He facilitated some of the first thinking around circular economy in the Australian water sector, and material flow analysis with sydney Water to identify potential circular economy opportiunities and levers.

Pierre’s PhD thesis examined the impact of climate change on water resource management in small towns. The thesis demonstrated an approach that could be adopted by small towns to develop their water adaptation response to climate change impacts that includes an assessment of existing climate variability responses. By drawing on a case study of a small town in South Africa, it was demonstrated that the consequence of climate change impacts on water resources is an economic issue when it comes to meeting projected water demand and ensuring access to basic water supplies.

He was the key developer of the framework developed for the Melbourne water utilities to address the uncertainty of climate change in ensuring a resilient water supply system, similarly more recently for the next Lower Hunter Water Plan. He had also made these concepts accessible for Pacific Island states when planning smaller community water supply systems under future uncertainty.