世界泥沙研究学会主席WALLING教授讲话

      国际泥沙信息网10月19日讯  世界泥沙研究学会于今日正式成立，世界泥沙研究学会主席WALLING教授讲话。全文如下：
Address delivered by Professor Des Walling, President of WASER, on the occasion of the inauguration of WASER, at the 9th ISRS, Yichang, China,October 19, 2004.

Your excellency Professor Meng, Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen.

It was a great honour and privilege to be elected President of WASER during the first Council meeting, held in Beijing last Saturday. I hope that I will be able to fulfil the expectations of those that elected me and I look forward to serving the Association. As a hydrologist/geomorphologist who started working in the field of erosion and sedimentation some 35 years ago, I have long appreciated the need for, and importance of, interaction with those with similar interests working in adjacent disciplines, for example, civil engineers, hydraulic engineers, soil scientists, geochemists, agricultural engineers, soil conservation specialists, watershed managers, estuarine scientists, and increasingly social scientists and environmental managers. I therefore strongly believe that one of WASER’s key roles, and indeed probably it’s most important role, should be to facilitate and promote such interaction and interchange.

Before saying more about WASER and its role, I hope that you will permit me to look back. I want to look back nearly 25 years to March 1980 and to the 1st International Symposium on River Sedimentation held in Beijing, which can be seen as having sown the seed for WASER. I attended the 1st ISRS, and in my view it was a very special meeting. It was probably the first truly multidisciplinary international gathering of scientist working on erosion and sedimentation. I am pleased to see several of the participants in the audience here today. Those present at the meeting included hydraulic engineers, civil engineers, agricultural engineers, hydrologists, geomorphologists, soil scientists, soil conservation specialists, and scientists and practitioners working on both rivers and estuaries and in both the field and the laboratory. This interdisciplinary mix has been a recurring theme of the successful series of ISRS symposia that followed that first meeting, and I think we owe a debt of gratitude to those who, 25 years ago, had the foresight to promote this interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, I would like to identify two people who played a key role in organising that meeting. The first is Professor Qian Ning, who has sadly passed away. I did not know him well, but I have always been impressed by the breadth of his work, which clearly demonstrated his recognition of the need for a broad-based approach to sediment investigations. The second is Professor Lin Bingnan, who again has long encouraged an interdisciplinary perspective. Professor Lin is unfortunately unable to travel to Yichang to be with us here today, but I met him in Beijing last week and I know that he has been a very active supporter of the creation of WASER. If the seeds for WASER were sown back in 1980 by Professors Qian Ning and Lin Bingnan, others helped nurture the seedling, allowing it to grow and flourish. They include Ding Lianzhen, Dai Dingzhong, Zhou Zhide, Wu Deyi and Tan Ying.  More recently, Professor Wang Zhaoyin has been instrumental in finally bringing the concept of WASER to maturity. In this he has been greatly helped by the Ministry of Water Resources, whose wide-ranging and strong support has been very important in bringing us to the point today where WASER can be inaugurated.

It is a great pleasure have Dr Chris George the Executive Director of IAHR and Professor Kuni Takeuchi, the President of IAHS, with us here today at the inauguration of WASER. This support is greatly appreciated and I would take this opportunity to reassure them that WASER does not aim to compete with their Associations. Rather, its aim is to collaborate and to complement their activities, by continuing the tradition of the ISRS series of symposia and promoting interdisciplinary interchange and interaction in the sediment field. I feel sure that most members of WASER will feel a first allegiance to their own particular discipline, but I hope that they will see WASER as a vehicle for promoting interaction with those from other disciplines, in order to assist in addressing the increasing complexity of sediment problems and sediment investigations as we move into the 21st century.

As a multidisciplinary organisation, one person cannot hope to represent effectively all fields embraced by WASER and I am delighted to have Professor Giampaolo Di Silvio from Italy and Professor Ted Yang from the USA as Vice-Presidents, since we all have very different backgrounds and interests. We in turn will be helped by a group of distinguished Council members with wide-ranging experience in the sediment field and by Professor Wang Zhaoyin, who has done so much in recent years to promote the formation of WASER and who becomes its first Secretary-General. I look forward to working with Professor Wang to promote the new Association.
 
I believe that the establishment of WASER here today can only be seen as timely, in view of the increasing recognition of sediment as a topic of global significance. This was emphasised yesterday by Dr Szollosi-Nagy in his speech at the opening ceremony and by Professor Takeuchi in his keynote address. If we look briefly at the movement of sediment from the slopes of a watershed to the sea, this significance is readily demonstrated. Erosion is a natural process, but it is accelerated by land use activities and it has been estimated that each year the world’s croplands lose almost 25 billion tonnes of soil in excess of soil formation. Viewed at the global scale, this represents a reduction in the global soil resource by about 7% each decade. This loss clearly has important implications for food production and global food security. Much of this sediment moves into the river systems of the world, where is poses many problems for river management and control. Furthermore, the fine sediment component of this flux has been frequently referred to as ‘the world’s number one pollutant’. It is a carrier of nutrients and contaminants, such as pesticides, heavy metals and other toxic organic substances and the fate of such contaminated sediment has wide-ranging environmental implications. Equally, the physical presence of fine sediment in excessive quantities in a river will rapidly cause degradation of the aquatic ecosystems, by exclusion of light and smothering of aquatic plants and substrates. Reservoirs constructed along river courses will frequently represent important sediment sinks and it has, for example, been estimated that the major reservoirs of the world are currently losing storage at the rate of about 1% per year. This loss of storage has in turn been estimated to represent an annual replacement cost of about $6 billion per year. Loss of reservoir storage can have serious impacts, by reducing water supply, hydropower production, the supply of irrigation water and the effectiveness of flood control schemes, all of which are important requirements for the economic development of the world in which we live. Ultimately, most rivers discharge their sediment load to the oceans and it should be recognised that both increases in reductions in their sediments loads can have important impacts on estuarine and coastal ecosystems, for example through the degradation of fish and shrimp spawning grounds, the destruction of mangrove swamps and the degradation of coral reefs. The need for an integrated interdisciplinary perspective, in order to address these and many other sediment-related problems, is clear. WASER will strive to promote such interdisciplinary work and it welcomes the possibility of becoming involved in the International Sedimentation Initiative (ISI) recently launched by UNESCO through its International Hydrological Programme (IHP) and which Dr Szollosi-Nagy  referred to in his speech yesterday.

Although WASER can trace its roots back to the 1st International Symposium on River Sedimentation held in China 1980, it is still very young and it needs to be nurtured, in order that it can grow and achieve its full potential. We are encouraged that more than 200 individuals have pledged their support for WASER, by becoming founder members. I would exhort everyone to promote the Association by helping to increase the membership still further. We are fortunate to have the International Journal of Sediment Research as the WASER journal and I hope that we can all promote this to become a flagship journal for work in the field of erosion and sedimentation. Plans are already in hand to build a website and to produce a newsletter. I hope that the journal, the newsletter and the website will play an important role in raising the profile of WASER and in facilitating the creation of its own unique identity. The Officers and Council of WASER will do their best to promote the development of WASER, but we need the support of an active and committed membership to build on the past 25 years and make it a success. Please give us your full support!