About Esmée Mes

Esmée Mes is a hydrologist, specialized in freshwater availability under drought conditions. She works in an integrative and interdisciplinary manner on these topics within the Water Resources Management department at Deltares.

She has obtained her master’s degree in Water Science and Management at Utrecht University, where her thesis focused on determining the importance and vulnerability of water towers on a regional scale in the Indus Basin. Her bachelor Liberal Arts and Sciences taught her how to look at problems in a holistic, interdisciplinary and integrated way. Her bachelor thesis focused on drought projections in Australia.

Esmée works on both the modelling-oriented and societal-oriented side of freshwater availability and is keen to put the obtained modelling results in the appropriate societal context to create more impact. She does this both in the Dutch and European context, trying to look from a river basin scale perspective. She has especially done much work on the Rhine and Meuse River Basin to see the changes in water availability and allocation under different future socio-economic and climate scenarios and under conditions of extreme droughts.

Her works contributes to gaining a better understanding of water allocation in different contexts, sectors, and countries, where her results are often obtained by using the water allocation model RIBASIM. She used this model, for example, in the European STARS4Water project, which aims to improve the understanding of climate change impact on water resources availability at river basin scale. She also looks at opportunities for coordination in a river basin context, and looks at measures to increase water availability, either through increasing water quantity or improving water quality. She has done this, for example, during a Meuse hackathon she helped organize, aimed to increase drought preparedness.

Esmée is also on the board of the Dutch Hydrological Association / Nederlandse Hydrologische Vereniging. She helps to organize sessions and webinars to connect water experts and make hydrologic knowledge more accessible. She is also learning French, hoping this can further help her in enabling collaboration and integration in a wider (river basin) context.

Apart from her work at Deltares she is also active as secretary in the board of the Dutch Hydrological Association / Nederlandse Hydrologische Vereniging