1995-2001
Professor John Rodda, DSc, FRMet Soc, FRGS, MCIWEM is currently an Hon. Fellow at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), Wallingford, Oxfordshire UK, Associate Director of HYDRO‐GIS Ltd, (a hydrological consultancy) and an Hon. Professor at the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Aberystwyth, Wales. He is also a member of the Board and a Trustee of IAHS Press Ltd.
His association with IAHS and IUGG commenced in 1967 at Berne, where he was elected President of the Precipitation Committee. He was appointed IAHS Editor in Moscow and established the IAHS Press to give a sound financial basis to the Association’s activities. He was .elected Secretary General in Canberra, resigning after Vancouver, in 1987, to become Director of the Hydrology and Water Resources Department of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. While at WMO, at the time of UNCED, he was chair of the UN Committee, now known as UN Water, which brings together all those UN bodies and agencies with programmes in water, some 25 in number. He led the water input to AGENDA 21.After his retirement from WMO in 1995 he was elected President of IAHS at Boulder. In 2002 he was awarded the IAHS/UNESCO/ WMO International Hydrology Prize.
John Rodda’s career spans the water operational activities of UK central government and research at the former Institute of Hydrology (now CEH) where he was Assistant Director. His research interests extend from experiments on the efficacy of rain gauges and studies of the effects of land use change on the hydrological behaviour of small basins, to the assessment of world water resources and work on drought and climate change. Systems of water governance at the national and international levels are another concern.
He has been a consultant to the UN World Water Assessment Programme, to ICSU, to UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme, to the European Union, to the UK Department for International Development and to the Natural Environment Research Council. He has been a visiting professor at several universities in the UK and on the Continent. He has published some 100 scientific papers and has written and edited a dozen or so books concerned with hydrology and water resources. He is currently coeditor of “Progress in Modern Hydrology” a book which aims to capture the advances in research in hydrology made at Wallingford over the last 60 years, which is to be published by Wiley on 5 August 2015.