Water for Life Voices

Voices of Experts

Gordon Young
International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS)

Gordon Young

"I have a totally different perspective because I’m here representing the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, so I represent the research community in water, which you may think is totally irrelevant to what’s being discussed here but we’ve just started last year a new research decade in hydrology and we’re linking it very much to the needs of society. So we’ve set up a whole series of working groups which will be working over the next 10 years and much of the work that they are doing is highly relevant to what is going on here. For example we’re looking at the better prediction of floods and droughts, the better prediction of how much water is going to be available for the various uses to which water is put. So here we have researchers trying to make their research products relevant to society and relevant to what’s being discussed here at the UN, so that’s a very different take.

The big thing has been the growth and development of UN-Water. And if you go back another 10 years, back to the Dublin conference and the first Rio summit, the precursor of UN-Water was really not very strong and because there was a sort of void if you like, a weakness in the UN system in the 1990s, that led to the creation of the World Water Council (WWC) and the Global Water Partnership (GWP), so this is getting a much longer perspective.

It has meant that everybody in the UN system and a whole lot of significant partners are working much more effectively together and that is really noticeable. It’s led to the advocacy for water issues being much stronger and UN water is playing a very, very significant role now in the water debates. The big change in my community is that we’re not just doing esoteric research, how rivers flow and how groundwater’s changing and so on, what we’re trying to make the hydrological research that we do relevant to the needs of society, we’re asking what are the needs of society in terms of better prediction of floods and droughts and better prediction of how much water is available in quantity and quality for all the various ways in which water is used. We’re looking to try to satisfy the needs to society. "

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