联合国教科文组织科学副助理总干事A.Szollosi Nagy在开幕式上致辞

国际水利工程与研究协会执行主任Christopher George

Your Excellency, Distinguished Guests and Delegates,

It is with great honour that I accepted the invitation to be here with you today in my capacity as Executive Director of the International Association of Hydraulic Engineering and Research which has traditionally co-sponsored  this event. I am also delighted to be making my first visit to the Three Gorges Dam!

IAHR is strongly supportive of  the River Sedimentation Series of Symposia as it relates closely to the interests of a large body of our membership around the world.

In the coming days ISRS will provide an excellent opportunity for you  to connect with each other as sedimentation specialists to share knowledge, and thereby advance this field of science.

However, is this enough? Perhaps not! It seems to me that  international professional associations such as IAHR and our sister co-sponsor IAHS need to work more closely with you to help disseminate these latest developments to a wider spectrum of interested parties.

Take IAHR as an example! We sponsor a range of specialist technical conferences in areas closely-related to this Symposium: in April this year over 500 members of our hydraulics structures community gathered in Tehran; in June we had the biennial meeting of our fluvial processes and  our hydroinformatics groups; in September nearly 400 ecohydraulics specialists gathered for their biennial meeting in Madrid, and this coming December our environmental hydraulics community will meet in Hong Kong,.  All of these groups should have an interest in what you will be discussing this week, and  I pledge our support  in disseminating the conclusions of your work here to these other groups. However, we equally need to work more closely with other professionals such as geographers, biologists, and sociologists to arrive at optimal and sustainable solutions to our future water resource problems – and this was the rationale behind the launch of our new Journal of River Basin Management last year in association with the International Basins Organisation (INBO) .

Next year in September 2005 IAHR will have its main biennial congress in Seoul, Korea – and sedimentation features strongly in the themes for this event. This is the event which brings together all the different strands of hydraulics – and we invite you to come and interact with this wider group of specialists.

However, is this enough? I think not.! What we have noticed in the increasing number of “mega water conferences” which have been organised in recent years - the Third World Water Forum in  Kyoto in 2003, the Second World Water Forum in The Hague in 2000 and the summit conference on water in Bonn in 2002 - is the strong voice of other water stakeholders but the relative absence of a voice from the “professions”. In fact, at times it seems at these events that there is a suspicion of the work of technical specialists such as ourselves. In many respects we have only ourselves to blame- as hydraulic engineers we have not been educated to communicate our work, or discuss it, with the wider community.  This is now changing, and in our last IAHR Newsletter, for example, we published a piece on curriculum changes in engineering education in Anglo-Saxon countries which stress “communication skills”.

I think that International professional water associations such as IAHR and IAHS could play a stronger role in spreading the message to the wider community that solutions to our future water problems do indeed exist – and that science and technology have an indispensable role to play in this process.

And so - I wish you every success for the Conference this week!