Silvia Colombo

Water security in a rapidly urbanizing Africa: can depleted water resources and fragile supply systems keep up with increasing demand?

Silvia is a DPhil candidate researching water security in urbanizing Africa. Her research aims to evaluate the impacts of rapid urbanization and climate change on urban water demand and availability in Africa, with the goal of identifying the most effective adaptation responses tailored to different urban contexts of the continent. She is part of the Oxford Programme for Sustainable Infrastructure Systems (OPSIS).

Silvia joined SoGE and the OPSIS team in July 2024 as a research associate specialising in infrastructure resilience analytics. She conducted innovative research to develop new methodologies and analyses that characterise the resilience of transport infrastructure systems on national and global scales. This research included analysing the physical climate risks associated with these infrastructures.

Before joining OPSIS, Silvia worked for almost three years as a research analyst for Industrial Economics, Incorporated (IEc), where she addressed climate change impacts on water supply in developing countries for World Bank projects. She holds an MSc in Environmental and Land Planning Engineering (with distinction) from Politecnico di Milano in Italy.

• Colombo, S., Pant, R., Young, M. et al. (2026) The African Transport Systems Database - a geospatial database of multi-modal connected networks. Sci Data, 13: 166.
• Colombo, S., Pant, R., Young, M., Thomas, F., Russell, T., Verschuur, J. and Hall, J.W. (2025) The African Transport Systems Database - a geospatial database of multi-modal connected networks [Dataset]. Zenodo.