INTERVIEW ČEDO MAKSIMOVIĆ Ph.D., PROFESSOR AT IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON
Civil Disobedience Is Sometimes
THE ONLY GOOD RESPONSE
An economy based on the high-quality management of the environment doesn’t only represent the economy of the future, but is also a precondition for the survival of human civilisation. Serbia is missing out on one opportunity after another to at least “keep pace” with countries that have similar economic power, and in certain areas it could be not only a regional leader, but easily also a European and world leader
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n the interview he gave for our publication six years ago, Imperial College London professor Čedo Maksimović warned that the whole world is confronted by a need to seriously reconsider long-term strategies for the management of water and that the old rules are no longer valid, as they are easily failing to deliver the services for which they are planned. That’s why we used our first question on this occasion to ask him to determine whether we’ve been successful in identifying new long-term strategies and new rules during this period. “New strategies are being identified and some of them are beginning to be implemented in practice relatively quickly. Faster in developed countries, slower in less developed countries, while many are failing to deal with new strategies and technologies at all. At the same time, the situation with shortages of good quality water is worsening almost the world over,” says our interlocutor, before clarifying: “the amount of water “in circulation” is the same, but the amount of water of a satisfactory quality is decreasing rapidly, primarily due to ever increasing water pollution. One fundamental new development is the revelation that it is becoming increasingly difficult to solve water problems in isolation. The solution lies in the gradual acceptance of integrated solutions (nexus) e.g., water in interactions with food, energy and pollution reduction. This is what we call Blue Green Solutions – BGS.” We are living in times when it seems that all the answers are to be found in the applying of high-tech solutions, in the use 18
Green Serbia 2022
