9 About the Author
Jac van der Gun is a Dutch groundwater hydrologist and water resources specialist, who graduated from Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He has been employed successively by a Dutch water supply company (WMG, Velp), UN-OTC (New York) and the Research and Development organization TNO (Delft/Utrecht). His professional career spans half a century and has focused on: 1) water resources exploration, water resources assessment and monitoring (including significant fieldwork components); 2) hydrogeological mapping; 3) water resources planning and management; and 4) training, capacity building and institutional development.
He has been involved actively in the Groundwater Reconnaissance and Mapping of The Netherlands and was entrusted with the overall responsibility for this program. His long-term assignments abroad include positions as a resident hydrologist in Bolivia and as a resident water resources assessment project manager in Yemen and in Paraguay. Investigating and documenting aquifers was a prominent activity in these projects. In addition, he carried out numerous short missions in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe for various international and national organizations, providing scientific-technical input, supervising projects, and formulating or evaluating projects and programs focusing on water resources. He has also lectured at UNESCO-IHE (Delft) on groundwater for more than thirty years. In 2003 he became the founding director of the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre (IGRAC) and since then he has been mainly active in groundwater-related projects of international organizations such as UNESCO, FAO, GEF and IGRAC (e.g., the Groundwater Governance Project, WWAP’s Water Resources Development Reports, the Transboundary Water Assessment Project TWAP and GGRETA). Together with Jean Margat, he wrote the book ‘Groundwater around the World’ (2013). A few years later, in cooperation with Karen Villholth, Elena López-Gunn, Kirstin Conti and Alberto Garrido, he produced the book ‘Advances in Groundwater Governance’ (2018).