Japanese Special Issue Volume 6. From the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico—a strategy for the prevention of hydro-meteorological disaster through establishment of the UNESCO–PWRI Centre

✍ Scribed by Yosuke Yamashiki; Koichiro Kuraji; Akira Kawamura

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 36 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6087
• DOI: 10.1002/hyp.6087

✦ Synopsis

of Hydrology and Water Resources (JSHWR). The 4th World Water Forum is held in March 2006 in Mexico City, 3 years after the 3rd World Water Forum held in Kyoto in 2003. The United Nations World Water Development Report (WWAP, 2003) illustrated the major topics discussed in Kyoto, including water scarcity and privatization, natural disaster, water quality, health impacts, and climate change. Despite the enthusiastic discussion that took place in Kyoto, there was still only limited recognition of the impacts of the climate-change-related hydro-meteorological disasters that had already begun attacking us.

A large number of developed countries have been plagued by catastrophic flood disasters in recent years. For example, hurricanes Katrina and Rita were two of the worst recorded historical disasters to have hit North America. Thousands of Japanese have also suffered due to the unusually large occurrence of typhoons in Japan in 2004.

The increase of sea-surface temperature is assumed to be one of the major reasons for the increasing power of hurricanes (Emanuel, 2005), which supports the claim that global warming may cause an increase in hydro-meteorological disasters. It is clear that our target research field is no longer dominated by the study of natural science, but has shifted its focus to that of saving lives in the face of catastrophic disaster.

The UNESCO-PWRI Centre, introduced in the cover invited political note in HYP-JSI6, is to be established for the very purpose of collecting and disseminating knowledge regarding flood disaster. The centre will conduct research, capacity-building and training programmes, and support information networking activities at the local, national, regional and global levels.

In addition to a paper introducing the UNESCO-PWRI Centre, three policy-related papers that include results of discussions that occurred during WWF3 follow this Preface: Issues in WCD report development; Ecosystem approach to mitigate impacts of sedimentation on the hydrological cycle and aquatic ecosystem; and Indicators for effective decision making on ecosystem-based river basin management.

Eight technical papers are also included on the following topics: Transpiration from a Cryptomeria japonica plantation forest: canopy coupling to the atmosphere; Transpiration from a Cryptomeria japonica plantation forest: responses of canopy conductance to meteorological factor; Role of spatial variability of rainfall intensity through improvement of Eagleson's classical model; Detectability of interannual variations in terrestrial water storage from the GRAC; An application of an originally developed flood risk analysis system for impact analysis of a flood control plan in a river basin; A downscaling method of topographic index distribution for matching the scales of model application and parameter identification; Decrease of river runoff in the Lake Balkhash basin in Central Asia; and Hydrogeochemical properties of a salinity-affected coastal aquifer in western Japan.