The 1st International Conference on Water Security will welcome academics, thinkers and practitioners from around the world to present, discuss and highlight key issues and directions for change from scientific and policy perspectives, including data needs and how data can be acquired, successful public and private sector business models in different settings, political opportunities and obstacles, what the expressed human needs are, and where the knowledge gaps exist. The central goal of the conference is to advance the science needed to make informed decisions about water allocations now and in the future.

Accepted submissions will supplement presentations from our invited speakers. In addition, we plan to have workshops to promote further scientific interaction. There will be a limit to the number of participants accepted to each workshop (places in each workshop are available on a first-come, first-served basis and attendees must be registered for the conference prior to booking their place). Our aim is to nurture effective participation with the goal of delivering tangible ideas to synthesize and report at the end of the meeting. These ideas will be circulated broadly through the Elsevier Water Security journal.

Themes and topics:
Below, we give an outline of the types of topics for which we expect to receive submissions. However, we emphasize that a broad inquiry on water security is welcome.

• How do water governance, institutions, aging infrastructure and finance come together to achieve water security in the developed world?
• The science of integrated water management (smart watersheds, water services, agricultural, energy, minerals and other use systems, environmental flows, legacies, collaborative governance, BMPs).
• Climate, renewable energy, economic development and demographic change and migration: challenges or opportunities for regional water security. Water security and conflict (either transboundary water cooperation or armed conflict and water).
• Urban water security.
• Technological innovation and big data for water security: emerging directions and prospects.
• Indigenous and hybrid knowledge systems, common-pool resource systems, and perspectives in water security.
• Sustainable development, ecosystems and human health as water security objectives.
• Water and health.

Abstracts for oral and poster presentations are invited on the conference topics by 15 December 2017.