World Water Forum

At the Forum, IGRAC performed two main activities; one of them - convening the session - was very short and intense, whereas the other - staffing the IGRAC booth - took much more time and much less pressure.

Together with UNESCO and WEF, IGRAC convened a session "Groundwater and risk management: coping with water scarcity, climate change and emergency situations" on Tuesday 21^st March (Session No.FT5.09).

The Session Report is available (pdf, 0.24Mb), including session programme, synopsis, key messages and lesson learned.

The session consisted of three main parts:

• Opening and introduction
• Presentation of Local Actions
• Expert panel comments and open discussion

The room was at the certain moment too small to receive all those interested in the session.

The session was opened by Mr Koichiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO. Subsequently, the audience was addressed by Mr Sindani, Director-General of the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, Republic of South Africa and Ms Okeke, Secretary of State of the Ministry of Water Resources of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

A key-note entitled Groundwater and risk management" (ppt, 2.6MB) was presented by IGRAC's Jac van der Gun.
The following local actions were presented:

• Kenya sand dams by Mr Jeroen Aerts, Free University Amsterdam, The Netherlands (a film was shown; a brief description is available in the Session Report)
• River Toyohiragawa alluvial fan by Mr Hu Sung Gi, WEF Japan
• Tsunami and the Indian coastal groundwater and emergency remediation strategy by Mr Bhanu Neupane, UNESCO New Delhi, India
• Groundwater for emergency situation (GWES) with respect to the catastrophic flood on the Labe (Elbe) River in the Czech Republic by Mr Jan Šilar, Prof. Emeritus, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.

In the third part of the session, the expert panel members made several valuable comments and statements. For instance, Mr Mark Dierikx (Director-General Water, Ministry of Public Works and Water, The Netherlands) emphasized the importance of the availability and the quality of information on groundwater and stated that the Dutch Government is happy to contribute to these requirements by supporting IGRAC (read more in the Session Report).

At the IGRAC booth (located in the Dutch Water Pavilion) we very happy to meet many forum participants, to be able to introduce our centre and to hear about variety of groundwater problems and activities. We also had an opportunity to meet with our colleagues and project partners (from UNESCO, WMO, OAS, RIHN, etc) and to discuss the current and future activities.