The Science for water Solutions decade: HELPING – Hydrology Engaging Local People IN one Global world is now evolving using a strategic planning process according to the time plan. 

The Vienna workshop successfully identified an overarching Scientific goal: Understanding hydrological diversity and integrating knowledge across scales and regions, followed by a number of sub-goals, addressing research, products or community building. The next step is to create Working Groups. 

Please suggest a Working Group to support the HELPING goal(s) by 15 June HERE! 

HELPING Logo

The logo of the HELPING decade will be found through an open competition. The winner will be selected through an open voting procedure at the IAHS meeting within the IUGG Assembly in Berlin. Your logo can be submitted as either .jpeg or .png or .pdf files and in a file size that is small enough to send via email. Please send your logo, together with a short description explaining your thoughts/ideas behind the design, to [email protected] before 30 June 2023.

IAHS are pleased to announce that the 2023 Tison award goes to Gunther Liebhard (Austria) for his work on the 2022 Hydrological Sciences Journal paper:

Partitioning evapotranspiration using water stable isotopes and information from lysimeter experiments, Hydrological Sciences Journal, Volume 67, Issue 4, Pages 646-661, DOI: 10.1080/02626667.2022.2030866

The paper was co-authored by Andreas Klik (Austria), Christine Stumpp (Austria) & Reinhard Nolz (Austria) who are not eligible for the Tison Award, age-wise.

This award is prestigious with a 1000 US$ prize and a 1 year subscription to HSJ sponsored by Taylor & Francis, the publisher of Hydrological Sciences Journal. The award will be presented during the IAHS prize ceremony on 15 July 2023 during the IUGG General Assembly in Berlin, Germany.

The paper is open access link.

The IAHS Tison Award, established in 1982, aims to promote excellence in research by young hydrologists. The Award is granted for an outstanding paper published by IAHS in a period of two years previous to the deadline for nominations. The description of the award is available here.

HELP to define HELPING!

There are still seats available at the Vienna workshop (29/4 at TU Wien, back-to-back with EGU) to define actions, work clusters and leaders for initiating the new decade. The aim is to set the scene for water solutions by linking global and local research in IAHS. More information is available in this invitation. Please register here! You can also insert suggestions and volunteer to take the lead for Actions directly in the online Forum.

About HELPING:

The next IAHS decade will be dedicated to local solutions under the global water crisis. The short name will be HELPING, and stand for Hydrology Engaging Local People IN one Global world.

The new topic makes a nice trilogy with the previous two decades, ranging from Predictions (PUB) to Change (Panta Rhei) to Solutions (HELPING).

The topic of the new decade distilled from the outcome of the Córdoba workshop and the preceding vivid discussions online, followed by a simple survey on preference of selected topics. 130 persons answered on which topic they wanted to engage with (multiple choices) resulting in top scores for:

·         global and local hydrological interactions (60%);

·         water security (40%);

·         empowering people and science communication (35%).

Based on this the selected writing team has now launched a condensed Concept Note.

The next step is to define actions, work clusters and leaders for initiating the new decade. The Forum is open for suggesting Actions and volunteers to the themes. In addition, two splinter meetings will be held inside EGU on Thursday 27 April and a dedicated workshop will be held at TU Wien on Saturday the 29 April. The full concept of the Next Scientific decade will be launched in July at the IUGG General Assembly in Berlin.

Phishing or suspicious emails or texts claiming to be from IAHS

Have you received an email or text (SMS) requesting assistance or personal help of an IAHS officer? Is someone asking about your IAHS account, email, phone number, password, or payment method? If so, it probably did not come from us.

We will never ask you to enter your personal information in a text or email. This includes:

• • Credit or debit card numbers
  • Bank account details
  • IAHS passwords.

Please, ignore emails and texts that are not specific or expected. If the email or text links to an URL that you don't recognise, do not tap or click it. If you did already, do not enter any information on the website that opened.

Scammers can’t get information from you unless you give it to them. So don’t click any links in the messages or reply to them.

Please forward any suspicious emails to [email protected] so that we can report the phishing attack.

IAHS Has The Floor at UN 2023 Water Conference

The IAHS Science for Water Solutions decade is recognised as a stepping stone towards the UN sustainable development goals. We are well aligned with the UN actions and together we can make an impact on the global movement.

We were represented at the UN 2023 Water Conference 22-24 March 2023 by Berit Arheimer (President), Christophe Cudennec (Secretary General), and Salvatore Grimaldi (Vice President). After contributing to the shaping of the conference in our capacity as Partner of UN Water, we had an explicit participation in several sessions and side events in New York. In particular, Berit Arheimer discussed, with representatives of the IAHS' parent organisation ISC - International Science Council, UNESCO, WMO, UNDP, UNEP, UNCCD, IAEA and Ministers of several countries around Korea, the contribution of organised science to the proposed Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Water Sustainability. The under-shaping IAHS Science for Solutions decade HELPING confirms to be a timely and relevant community-driven mechanism to feed #WaterAction.

The official statement and commitment by IAHS for Water Actions reads:

The International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) has 10,000 members from 150 countries and is part of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, and of the International Science Council.
IAHS strongly support the ideas on regular Global water assessments (similar to IPCC), early warnings for all, water-centric decision support, and to govern water and ecosystems as common goods.
IAHS recognise the problem with water issues being spread over many actors at all scales, AND likewise, the scientific knowledge - of drivers, impacts, solutions, responses in the water cycle - is also fragmented. We lack scientific synthesis and systems analysis, and we lack scientific messages between scientists, across disciplines and between scientists and practitioners.
Therefore, IAHS now commits to lead and coordinate a Science for Solutions Decade (2023-2033), and we have agreed to call it HELPING – “Hydrology Engaging Local People IN one Global world”. The aim is solutions for the water crisis, leaving no catchment or hydrologist behind, in search for scientific evidence to understand the hydrological processes at local and global scales, their interactions and diversity.
IAHS will organise this decade as a bottom-up process empowered by local hydrologists and scientists using open science and merging local and big data. IAHS believe that scientific sharing and collaboration can be a game changer, when solving local water problems with too much, too little or too dirty. Right now the process is open for suggesting actions and the Decade will kick-off in July 2023 at IUGG General Assembly in Berlin.

With this initiative, we will coordinate concerted actions from the global scientific community - HELPING to overcome the water crisis.

From 27 February to 01 March 2023 an IAHS Workshop was held in Florianópolis, Brazil. Forty delegates of Latin American countries met to discuss the particularities and similarities of hydrological research and water security in Latin America, the Unsolved Problems in Hydrology (UPH) of the region, the opportunities of collaborations across countries, and in what way IAHS and national associations could help. A list of 23 Unsolved Problems in Hydrology in Latin America (UPH LA) was compiled similarly to the international ones. It was envisaged that a Latin America Regional Committee within IAHS would be appropriate to facilitate regular regional meetings on subjects of particular concern and galvanize the community around such subjects. A similar meeting will be held in Chile in early 2024 to continue the process of collaboration under the umbrella of IAHS. Stay tuned for more information.

Phishing or suspicious emails or texts claiming to be from IAHS
Did you receive a request for assistance or personal help from an IAHS officer? Is someone asking about your IAHS account, email, phone number, password, or payment? 
If so, it probably did not come from us. Please, ignore emails that are not specific or expected.

The United Nations World Water Development Report 2023: Partnerships and cooperation for water, launched today, directly informs the UN 2023 Water Conference discussions (22-24 March), describing how building partnerships and enhancing cooperation across all dimensions of sustainable development are essential to accelerating progress towards the Sustainable Development Goal for water and sanitation (SDG 6) and realizing the human rights to water and sanitation.

As an official partner of UN Water, IAHS contributed to this report, in particular chapter 7 (Climate change), chapter 9 (Education and capacity development) and chapter 11 (Innovation).

Read more here.

This policy brief of the International Science Council (ISC), which includes Christophe Cudennec (IAHS Secretary General) as a Contributor, for the UN 2023 Water Conference highlights the importance of science and the importance of actionable knowledge in responding to current global water crises as well as emerging and future challenges.

The brief groups the numerous water challenges into four main categories with associated examples and focal areas that each demand different scientific responses. Together with concluding advice, this policy brief aims to efficiently engage with policy- and decision-makers and other stakeholders at UN- and Member States-level to translate scientific insights into tangible improvements and support the water-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the achievement of the 2030 Agenda.

Click here for more information and to download the brief.

The next IAHS decade will be dedicated to local solutions under the global water crisis. The short name will be HELPING, and stand for Hydrology Engaging Local People IN one Global world.

The new topic makes a nice trilogy with the previous two decades, ranging from Predictions (PUB) to Change (Panta Rhei) to Solutions (HELPING).

Explanation of Acronym

Helping = we need to collaborate, share and help each other to overcome the water crisis.

Hydrology = Hydrological sciences should underpin management and governance of water resources; thus, we need better understanding of impact from global drivers at local scales and vice versa.

Engaging = co-creation of knowledge includes shared capacity, common learning and community engagement. 

Local = water phenomena and problems are often unique at the local scale and solutions must therefore be solved considering local needs and knowledge.

People = the purpose is to connect people (scientists, practitioners, communicators and the general public) with similar interests to co-design, accumulate and transfer hydrological knowledge worldwide. 

IN one = together we can advance science faster than individually to overcome shared or similar challenges.

Global world = the Planet is in an emergency state with complex water-cycle interactions, which needs urgent actions to not leave anybody or any catchment behind.

Community Process

The topic of the new decade distilled from the outcome of the Córdoba workshop and the preceding vivid discussions online, followed by a simple survey on preference of selected topics. 130 persons answered on which topic they wanted to engage with (multiple choices) resulting in top scores for:

·         global and local hydrological interactions (60%);
·         water security (40%);
·         empowering people and science communication (35%).

Based on this the selected writing team (see below) has now launched a condensed Concept Note, which is found at the IAHS website under Initiatives/Scientific Decade. https://iahs.info/Initiatives/Topic-for-the-Next-IAHS-decade.do 

Actions and What to do

The next step is to define actions, work clusters and leaders for initiating the new decade. The Forum will be open for suggested themes and volunteers. In addition, two splinter meetings will be held at EGU on Thursday 27 April and a dedicated workshop will be held at TU Wien on Saturday the 29 April. Register here!

Click here to access more information about the Next Decade.

Workshop agenda 29 April at Technical University of Vienna

09.00 – 10.00 Intro and discussion of overall aim and expected outcome
10.00 – 10.30 BREAK
10.30 – 12.00 Brainstorming ideas on Actions and results
12.00 – 12.30 Reporting in Plenum
12.30 – 13.00 Discussion, Synthesis and Decision
13.00 – 14.00 LUNCH
14.00 – 15.00 Clustering the defined actions
15.00 – 15.30 Discussion and Decision
15.00 – 16.00 Wrap-up and Way forward
16.00 THE END

Acknowledgement

The original outcome document was consolidated from reflective and creative input by the IAHS community in the Cordoba workshop (50 persons) during three days; online meetings (100 persons) in three time-zones; posts in a forum (40) of the IAHS website. The condensed concept note was drafted by a smaller team of writers (15 persons) who contributed actively in organising the process and represents different parts of IAHS:

The IAHS Officers and Córdoba workshop organisers: Berit Arheimer, Christophe Cudennec, Günter Blöschl, Salvatore Grimaldi, Maria José Polo
Online conveners or co-conveners: Barry Cloke, Chris Leong, Stacey Archfield, Giova Mosquera, Melody Sandells, Jean-Marie Kileshye Onema
The Early Career Committee: Moctar Dembélé, Bertil Nlend
Early carrier opinion paper in HSJ (lead author): Tessa van Hateren
South America initiative: Pedro Chaffe