Our Mission: To facilitate the adoption of transformative watertreatment solutions that enable safe water reuse. 

Our Vision: To be a national resource bringing together research, outreach, and education to effectively reduce the nation’s water challenges that are exacerbated by climate change.

CONSERVE was launched in 2016 through a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Health to the University of Maryland School of Public Health. 

We employ a systems approach, bringing together diverse disciplines to research and facilitate energy-efficient, agricultural and municipal water reuse here in Maryland and across the nation. We then share this new knowledge through extensive outreach, use it to improve public policy, and employ experiential education to teach, train, and inspire future leaders.

To expand our educational efforts, we won a prestigious $3 million graduate student training award in 2018 from the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NSF NRT) Program to launch UMD Global STEWARDS. Our vision is for this program to become a national model for the preparation of lifelong learners, stellar science communicators and distinctive professionals ready to realize transdisciplinary food-energy-water nexus solutions to sustain future generations.

To scale our approach globally, we have partnered with the Arava Institute, CultiVaid, Mbeya University of Science & Technology, Kathmandu University and Sanskriti Farms and Research Center, and launched the Global FEWture Alliance with funding from the University of Maryland Grand Challenges Program. This University of Maryland-based international Alliance advances systems-based interdisciplinary research-to-action, community-driven capacity building, and experiential education to effect positive change in underserved communities at the nexus of food, energy, water, (FEW) climate, and health. 

By bringing together a diverse transdisciplinary team across multiple continents to develop and implement  sustainable global solutions, CONSERVE and the Global FEWture Alliance have turned the prospect of reversing global food, energy and water challenges from wishful thinking to a plausible reality.