Hydrology As a Policy-Relevant Science

HYDROLOGICAL PROCESSES Hydrol. Process. 18, 2967–2976 (2004) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/hyp.5743

Hydrology as a policy-relevant science

Kuniyoshi Takeuchi* University of Yamanashi, Kofu 400-8511, Japan

Abstract: Water is now a global political agenda and water science is part of it. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, the 3rd World Water Forum and Ministerial Conference in Kyoto in 2003 and the G8 Summit in Evian in 2003 were all concerned about urgent global water issues and call for international scientific research collaboration. Hydrology is responding to such political commitments with various scientific initiatives that include the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB), the Global Energy and Water Circulation Experiments (GEWEX) Coordinated Enhanced Observation Period (CEOP), and the Global Water Systems Project (GWSP). These initiatives will play key roles in the implementation of the new intergovernmental project, Global Earth Observing System of Systems, under preparation by Global Observation Summits from 2003 to 2005. In order to achieve the MDGs, hydrological science has to play a major role supporting policy makers by overcoming methodological obstacles and providing the necessary information. This paper emphasizes that: the availability of ground measurements is a limiting factor that prevents the full use of scientific knowledge; hydrology has to integrate and downscale the various global information into local-scale information useful for river basin management; as the availability of professional personnel is in critical short supply, in addition to funds needed, to achieve the MDGs any scientific research should always accompany capacity-building programmes to close the science divide between developed and developing nations. Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

KEY WORDS GEOSS; IAHS; PUB; GWSP; hydrological downscaling; reduction of predictive uncertainty; Millennium Development Goals; policy-relevant science; capacity building

INTRODUCTION In the water sector there no longer seems to be a serious lack of political awareness. The governmental and intergovernmental commitments on global water issues have been made clear and the major focus is now on implementation. Naturally, implementation is much more difficult than just raising awareness, but the series of political commitments made in the highest level meetings provide the strong bases to start the necessary actions. Until very recently the governmental commitments were not so obvious. The United Nations (UN) Millennium Declaration was adopted by the 55th UN General Assembly in September 2000 (UN, 2000) and issued the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were followed by a series of strong governmental and intergovernmental actions in the field of water management and water sciences. The MDGs include the water goal of halving, by 2015, the population without access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation. This is a numerical goal with a set time limit. It is markedly different to the International Sanitation Decade (1980–89) declared by the UN Water Conference in Mar del Plata in 1977, which was not followed by the necessary actions. The MDGs are supported by many follow-up actions, including scientific and educational initiatives. The dawn of a new water-conscious era seems to be upon us. The Global Observation Summits currently under way are seeking international agreement and scientific collaboration on global observations in the form of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) 10-year plan to be finalized in early 2005. This is going to encourage and integrate the various on-going

* Correspondence to: Kuniyoshi Takeuchi, University of Yamanashi, Kofu 400-8511, Japan. E-mail: [email protected] Received 30 June 2003 Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 21 June 2004 2968 K. TAKEUCHI

Earth observation and analysis activities. Such activities include the Global Energy and Water Circulation Experiments (GEWEX) Coordinated Enhanced Observation Period (CEOP), the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) Prediction in Ungauged Basins (PUB), and the Global Water Systems Project (GWSP). The UNESCO International Hydrological Program (IHP) is also planning its seventh phase programme (2008–13), which will echo these international movements. In order to achieve the UN MDGs, there are at least two major components, other than funding, required from the science sector. They are the professional personnel to lead the implementation of the achievement programmes and the hydrological data to design efficient operational plans. The use of science is limited by the availability of local ground measurements. The lack of such measurements prevents the identification of physical parameters and the use of hydrological knowledge and models, however advanced they are, for efficient planning. Hydrologists are expected to downscale and translate the recent remarkable achievements of global-scale research into locally useful information and show local river-basin managers their practical use. Hydrologists are expected to interpret local phenomena and explain their relation to regional and global-scale phenomena. Hydrologists are responsible for being the user interface needed to translate scientific knowledge into practice. At the same time, such scientific efforts should coincide with capacity building, so that the science divide between advanced and developing countries becomes narrower rather than wider. Scientific research should always go with capacity-building programmes, since capacity building is the only sure way to achieve sustainable development. In relation to these missions, this paper discusses the significance of the GEOSS plan and the IAHS PUB initiative and their efforts in bringing hydrology to the scale and precision that is meaningful to local water management.

POLITICAL AWARENESS ON GLOBAL WATER ISSUES AND SCIENCE MDGs and World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) The UN 55th General Assembly in September 2000 adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration resolution (UN, A/RES/55/2, 2000). Chapter 3 of the declaration is Development and Poverty Eradication, referred to as the MDGs where the top goal stated in Paragraph 19 refers directly to the problem of water, that is: To halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and, by the same date, to halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, November 2002, identiﬁed water and sanitation, energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity (WEHAB) as the ﬁve priority areas and endorsed the MDGs in their Plan of Implementation of WSSD (UN, 2002). Furthermore, in Paragraph 8, Chapter 2, it extended the ‘safe drinking water’ phrase of the MDGs to include ‘basic sanitation’, i.e. ‘To halve, by the year 2015, the population of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water (as outlined in the Millennium Declaration) and the proportion of people who do not have the basic sanitation, ...’. It is worth noting that ‘drinking water and sanitation’ are among the MDGs with a numerical target and time limit, but not ‘disasters’. In the Millennium Declaration (UN, 2000), Chapter 4 ‘Protecting our common environment’ Paragraph 23 states ‘To intensify cooperation to reduce the number and effects of natural and manmade disasters’ but with no numerical target or time limit. This may be interpreted as follows: the lack of safe drinking water and basic sanitation is a matter of poverty and much more urgent than disasters. It is claimed that the number of people who lose their lives by water-borne disease, mostly infants, is 6000 per day, which is incomparably larger than the casualties associated with either natural or manmade disasters.

Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 18, 2967–2976 (2004) HYDROLOGY AS A POLICY-RELEVANT SCIENCE 2969

However, from a water hazards point of view, the consequences of too much, too little and too dirty waters are also much related to poverty, taking more lives away from poorer countries. It is also important to halve the number of lives lost and people affected by natural disasters by 2015. In fact, there is a UN initiative, International Strategy of Disaster Reduction, following the previous International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction for 1990–99 (UN, 2001, 2004). The political commitments are, however, still to materialize at meetings such as in the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) Conference in Kobe, 2005. The Ministerial Conference of the 3rd World Water Forum (WWF) in Kyoto, Shiga and Osaka, Japan in March 2003 and the G8 Summit in Evian, France, in June 2003 further endorsed the MDGs and the WSSD Plan of Implementation. They called for action plans, including science supports. It is remarkable for the umbrella policy implementation plan to include water sciences speciﬁcally as essential components for solving global water issues. The Plan of Implementation of WSSD (UN, 2002) states, for example in Paragraph 28, the following:

Improve water resource management and scientiﬁc understanding of the water cycle through cooperation in joint observation and research, and for this purpose encourage and promote knowledge-sharing and provide capacity-building and the transfer of technology, as mutually agreed, including remote-sensing and satellite technologies, particularly to developing countries and countries with economies in transition.

Statements were repeated in the Ministerial Conference of the 3rd WWF and in the Evian G8 Summit. In the G8 Action Plan on Water (G8, 2003), it was stated, in Chapter 4, Strengthening monitoring, assessment and research, as follows: 4Ð2 We will support strengthening water monitoring capacity in partner countries to complement existing monitoring efforts. 4Ð3 We will support the development of mechanisms for collaboration in water-cycle related research, and enhance research efforts in this area. Following this agreement, the Global Observation Summits were held in Washington, DC, in July 2003 and in Tokyo in April 2004. The summit is now preparing a 10-year plan for GEOSS to be ﬁnalized by early 2005.

GEOSS In the Tokyo Summit, the Framework Document for Earth Observation Summit II was adopted (EO Summit, 2004). The GEOSS is a user-driven programme and the framework document was prepared involving various user’s communities. Professional voices were collected in the planning stage through a number of preparatory meetings in different nations and international organizations. The adopted framework in Tokyo explicitly states the following socio-economic beneﬁts as the concrete purposes of Earth observations:

ž Reducing loss of life and property from natural and human-induced disasters. ž Understanding environmental factors affecting human health and well being. ž Improving management of energy resources. ž Understanding, assessing, predicting, mitigating, and adapting to climate variability and change. ž Improving water resource management through better understanding of the water cycle. ž Improving weather information, forecasting, and warning. ž Improving the management and protection of terrestrial, coastal, and marine ecosystems. ž Supporting sustainable agriculture and combating desertiﬁcation. ž Understanding, monitoring, and conserving biodiversity.

These form the nine priority areas for observation beneﬁciaries. The target user communities speciﬁed are decision makers, private sectors, scientists, educators and the general public covering all stakeholders.

As key observation areas, the framework document says that ‘the coordinated and sustained global cooperation on Earth observations is well established in the crucial area of weather’ by groups such as the World Meteorological Organization World Weather Watch but ‘less advanced in the areas of land, water, climate, ice, and ocean observation’ with important guidance for future actions by organizations such as ISDR, World Climate Research Program (WCRP), Global Ocean Observing System, Integrated Global Observing Strategy Partnership (IGOS-P), and so on. In those areas, ‘the observation efforts to understand dynamic Earth processes have been identified and should be expanded to support action-oriented solutions in the areas of key socio-economic benefit’. Current shortcomings of observation systems include lack of access to data, eroding technical infrastructure, large spatial and temporal gaps, a lack of relevant processing systems to transform data into useful information, and insufficient long-term data archiving. The GEOSS identifies that the basic need is for the plan to be comprehensive, coordinated and sustained and that the plan should ‘facilitate both current and new capacity building efforts, particularly in developing countries, across the entire continuum of GEOSS activities, which will include education, training, institutional networks, communication, and outreach as fundamental to those efforts’. The GEOSS in the water-related field is thus a new commitment of governments, researchers and the public to collect, process and use proper data to plan and manage land and water in sustainable ways with sound scientific understanding.

IN SITU OBSERVATIONS, DOWNSCALING AND THE EARTH SIMULATOR In situ observations for model use The current major issue preventing practical use of hydrological sciences is not necessarily the level of scientific achievement, but rather the availability of data to make the hydrological science work. Any scientific knowledge of hydrology, such as models, formulas and other concepts, needs specific parameters to represent local phenomena and specific conditions. In other words, scientific interpretation is bounded by the availability of local observations. Hydrological phenomena are site specific and few theories or models are meaningful without local parameters that are identified by in situ observations or remote-sensing data calibrated by in situ ground truth. The in situ data are not necessarily only the natural flow or storage data, they also include the anthropogenic activity data such as water storage, water use, effluent discharge, groundwater pumping, types and amounts of agricultural and urban land use, as well as flow vectors. Remote-sensing data are made useful only with true observed data. This very point is often misunderstood, neglecting the importance of ground observations. The new GEOSS plan, IAHS PUB, CEOP and GWSP bring this point to attention, especially land surface phenomena, including anthropogenic activities of various kinds. There are a number of global assessment reports, such as World Water Assessment (Shiklomanov, 1998), IPCC reports (Houghton et al., 1992, 1996, 2001), World Water Vision (Cosgrove and Rijsberman, 2000), and the World Water Development Report (UNESCO–WWAP, 2003). They are currently the best available summaries of the Earth’s freshwater status and problems that serve as the basis for global policy making. Yet, regardless of the efforts to produce such global pictures, unless they are the aggregation of local reality the information is not necessarily useful to the local water management. The IPCC reports, for example, provide the extensive simulation results of global warming effects on climatic change by global circulation models (GCMs), yet their information is not well transferred to the local scale. The estimates, and the implication of global change, differ depending on the GCM used. Nevertheless, regardless of the precision of GCMs, such information should be translated into local conditions so the local water managers can utilize the latest global research products in their planning and management. For example, since dam construction affects basin hydrology for more than a century, future climate change impacts in the basin, and the uncertainties associated with these estimated impacts, are surely valuable information for reservoir planning. In this respect, hydrology

Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 18, 2967–2976 (2004) HYDROLOGY AS A POLICY-RELEVANT SCIENCE 2971 has a key role in translating the global research products into local information useful for the real-world river basin management. This is the hydrologists’ responsibility as well as an opportunity.

Methodology of hydrological downscaling The scientiﬁc methodology of downscaling the global information to local scale would include the use of the following:

1. Advanced satellite observations. Finer resolution sensors mounted on various satellites and interpretation methods provide more detailed information of the land surface. Such satellites/sensors include JERS1- SAR (synthetic aperture radar), SPOT, ICONOS, TERRA/MODIS, ENVISAT, ADIOS-II/GLI, AVNIR-2, ASTER, RADAR-SAT and ALOS/PALSAR. Also, altimeters TOPEX/POSEIDON, JASON-1 and gravity sensors such as used in GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) by NASA and partners provide new dimensions of information by using various combinations of radiation in the visible, infrared and microwave bands (Koike, 2004). 2. Statistical interpolation. There are numerous interpolation methods, ranging from simple weighted averages and spline functions to kriging and co-kriging, utilizing the temporal and spatial correlation structure among the distributed values. The co-kriging method can utilize the surrounding information such as topography and geology to interpolate the subject phenomena, such as the groundwater table (Zhang, 2003). 3. Monte Carlo data generation. Where the temporal–spatial statistical structure is known, Monte Carlo simulation is a powerful method of downscaling the phenomena, especially to generate their extremes. Fractal simulation and random cascade are examples that are attracting attention (Bloschl¨ and Sivapalan, 1995; Gupta et al., 1996; Kuzuha et al., 2002; Tachikawa et al., 2002). 4. Meso-scale meteorological dynamic simulation. There are many models available to solve meteorological dynamic equations for meso-scale region models (grids of several kilometres to several tens of kilometres), such as RAMS (Pelke et al., 1992), MRI/NPD NHM (Saito et al., 2001), MM5 (Dudhia et al., 2003), ARPS (Xue et al., 2001) and WRF (Michalakes et al., 1998). They are no longer only for meteorological modellers. Many hydrologists are using meteorological models to downscale large-scale GCM results to regional and local-scale phenomena. In addition, where the hydrological landscape parameterization has a large impact on the meterological model’s results, the hydrologists’ contributions are awaited. 5. Physically based distributed hydrological models. Land surface and subsurface hydrology can be simulated by physically based distributed hydrological models. Supported by large-scale high-speed computers and the advancement of hydrological modelling techniques, detailed hydro-meteorological simulation is becoming possible all over the world. The quality and resolution of digital elevation models, precipitation and radiation, land cover and land use, geology and, above all, water storage, withdrawal and distribution data control the quality of simulation results. The most decisive component is precipitation, and the Global Precipitation Mission (GPM) is expected to contribute greatly (Takeuchi et al., 1999; Lettenmaier et al., 2002; Ao et al., 2003a,b). 6. Multidimensional water balance method. The local-scale natural and anthropogenic water balance can be estimated by integrating various water resources and socio-economic data. Water availability, population, agricultural and industrial products, other land- and water-related activity data assembled in geographical information system (GIS) serve for estimating local water supply and use. This may be called ‘Hydrological 4DDA’, where 4DDA stands for four-dimensional data assimilation, and is an attempt to get the best estimate of hydrological and water resources parameters similar to atmospheric 4DDA, which seeks the best estimate of atmospheric parameters (Vorosmarty et al., 2000; Oki et al., 2001).

The Earth Simulator An opportunity exists for hydrological modellers to downscale GCM results into the river-basin-scale hydrology by integrating hydrological models with GCMs in the Earth Simulator. Currently, the Earth

Simulator is only serving meteorology and climate, not hydrology. It should be extended to hydrology and water resources all over the land surface and subsurface, including ecological, agricultural, water use and waste-water circulation. For this purpose, the grid-based distributed hydrological models are best suited. The detailed models should be developed in collaboration with ecologists, agronomists, biologists, geographers and so on. With such water resources components, the Earth Simulator becomes useful for all geo-scientists, as well as land and water managers. The Earth Simulator in the Japan Agency for Marine–Earth Science and Technology started operation in 2002. The development goal is 640 processor nodes, 40 Tflops (Terra flops) at peak performance and 5 Tflops at sustained performance by atmospheric GCMs (AGCMs), which is a thousand times the performance of AGCMs in 1997. It is capable of simulating the Earth in good detail to serve not only for meteorology but also for local river-basin management.

SCIENTIFIC INITIATIVES AND CAPACITY BUILDING IAHS PUB for meeting the basic hydrological information needs PUB is the IAHS’s decadal project launched in 2002 to improve the predictive capacity of hydrology to meet the basic hydrological needs of society. It was proposed and promoted by the IAHS through grassroots science discussion over the Internet. It is a combination of mission-driven and science-driven sciences. The societal mission of PUB is to deliver the best available predictive capacity to users of hydrological information where the data are urgently needed for better water resources development and management. The scientific objective of PUB is to reduce the hydrological predictive uncertainty through studying hydrological processes over different scales, landscape heterogeneity, geosphere–biosphere interaction and natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Both the societal and scientific objectives are supported by recent advancement of observational technology and basic hydrological knowledge. Although hydrological prediction technology cannot replace ground observations, developmental needs cannot wait for observation records to accumulate. Hydrology has to provide the best estimates using the information available. Remote-sensing data are important supplements where sufficient ground observations in time and space are not available. Also, downscaling technology is important where large-scale global estimates are available. PUB tries to assemble all the relevant technologies to achieve its two objectives societal as well as scientific. The PUB science plan (Sivapalan et al., 2003) was published in the IAHS’s Hydrological Sciences Journal as a result of discussions and debates at the Kofu PUB Preparatory Workshop (Takeuchi, 2002), the Brasilia PUB Kick-Off Symposium (Hubert et al., 2002) and the Sapporo PUB Workshop at the 6th IAHS Scientific Assembly. In the PUB science plan, it is clearly stated that PUB considers the following as its community objectives: to develop an observational field programme.

ž To increase the awareness of the value of data. ž To advance the technological capability around the world to make predictions in ungauged basins. ž To constrain the uncertainty in hydrologic predictions. ž To advance the scientiﬁc foundations to improve the understanding of hydrologic processes and the uncertainty of predictions. ž To actively promote ‘capacity-building’ activities.

The PUB project tries to replace the calibration needs of models with the understanding of process hydrology. The strategy to achieve this is: (1) to improve existing models through the better use of existing data archives, detail process studies, and uncertainty analyses and model diagnoses; (2) to develop new innovative models incorporating new data-acquisition techniques, new hydrological theories, and multiscale, spatially distributed modelling approaches. The PUB implementation strategy is a ‘pluralism approach’ that

Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 18, 2967–2976 (2004) HYDROLOGY AS A POLICY-RELEVANT SCIENCE 2973 welcomes any hydrological interests and initiatives that individual researchers and research groups have, but with a single common objective to reduce hydrological predictive uncertainty. The science plan (Sivapalan et al., 2003) further describes that PUB will be implemented by the grass roots working groups that are expected to be formed anywhere in the world. There are already formations of working groups reported in countries such as Japan, Australia, UK, USA and China. Anticipated are Thailand, Sri Lanka and other proposals from developing countries. There are a series of workshops and symposia held and planned all over the world on related themes. Experimental basin activities are also planned. PUB is expected to show the scientiﬁc methodology of translating the global research products into local- scale information. These would include the approaches described above for downscaling. PUB is ready to collaborate and contribute to mutually complementary programmes, such as UNESCO/IHP/FRIEND/HELP/ WMO, WHYCOS, GEWEX/CEOP and GWSP jointly organised by International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP)/World Climate Research Program (WCRP)/International Human Dimension Program (IHDP)/DIVERSITAS. The World Water Council (WWC) is preparing an associate programme, ‘Space to Earth’, to integrate all the professional communities from space to hydrology (including hydraulic engineering and water quality) and provide the necessary technology for better management of drought, ﬂoods, foods, health, the ecosystem and so on. The IAHS offers the lead role in this integration with IAHR, IWA, ESA/NASA/NASDA, etc.

GWSP The four basic research projects of the International Council of Sciences: IGBP, WCRP, IHDP and the DIVERSITAS programme for biodiversity have been jointly planning a new programme, GWSP, since 2001. In October 2003 the Open Science Conference on the GWSP was held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (USA), and The Global Water System Project: Science Framework and Implementation Activities (Framing Committee of the GWSP, 2004) was prepared. A brief outline of the project follows. The global water system is defined in the GWSP Framework as the global suite of water-related human, physical, biological, and biogeochemical components and their interactions. Examples of human components include water-related institutions, water engineering works and water-use sectors. Physical components include river discharge, river morphology and water storage. Biological and biogeochemical components include species richness, habitat quality and water quality. The GWSP believes that “Human-induced changes to the global water system are now globally significant and are being modified without adequate understanding of how the system works” and addresses the following overarching scientific question “How are human actions changing the global water system and what are the environmental and socio-economic feedbacks arising from the anthropogenic changes in the global water system?” It leads to the following major research themes of the GWSP:

Theme 1. What are the magnitudes of anthropogenic and environmental changes in the global water system and what are the key mechanisms by which they are induced? Theme 2. What are the main linkages and feedbacks within the Earth system arising from changes in the global water system? Theme 3. How resilient and adaptable is the global water system to change, and what are sustainable water management strategies?

The land-use change, deforestation, irrigation, dam construction, continuous levees, water intake, groundwater pumping, water transfer and many other human activities resulting in erosion, sediment trapping, changes in forest–ocean nutrient balance and waste discharge to the sea are obviously the major subjects of this project. Based on the knowledge obtained by the ﬁrst and second themes, the third theme is expected to provide the strategic answer to the various scales of water management across the globe.

Capacity-building activities Capacity building has been the major objective of many water-related international programmes and projects. In the UNESCO International Hydrological Program (IHP), water education and training has been its central theme since the very beginning in 1965 as the International Hydrological Decade. IHE Delft, University of Ireland in Galway, VITUKI Budapest, Nagoya University and others have been helping the IHP capacity- building activities. The recent transfer of the UNESCO water education function to IHE Delft is a major development in this field. It is now called UNESCO-IHE Water Education Center. IHE Delft started its education back in 1957 and has trained about 12 000 hydrologists to date. It is now offering various week- long to several months-long non-degree postgraduate courses and ME, MS and PhD degree courses lasting for more than 1 year. It seeks a global network of education and training institutes all over the world. Among many other water-related capacity-building programmes world wide, some new and closely related to the author are mentioned below. One is the anticipated UNESCO auspices International Center of ‘Water Hazards and Risk Management’, to be established in Tsukuba, Japan, in 2005. The major focus of the centre is flood management, reflecting its high regional concern in Southeast and East Asia, as well as the global intensification of meteorological events. Its major functions are research, training and networking of information. It plans to expand the long history of the Japan International Cooperation Agency water training courses. Also, a close collaboration will be sought with other university programmes in Kyoto, Nagoya, Tokyo, Tsukuba, and Yamanashi. At the University of Yamanashi, Kofu, Japan, ‘The 21st Century COE (Center of Excellence) for Research and Education on Integrated River Basin Management in Asian Monsoon Region’ was established in 2003 supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). A special doctoral course programme was launched and the Virtual Academy on integrated river- basin management was also begun. The doctoral course is for students who come to the University of Yamanashi, and the Virtual Academy is for water practitioners who remain at their home basins. The central theme is the merger of high technology with the local conditions of river basins in the Asian monsoon region. The Virtual Academy promotes the opportunity for local engineers to use the high technology in water quantity and quality management by themselves at home, with their own data, for their own purposes. Capacity building is the only sure way of sustainable development in any country. The science divide is created by neglecting the necessary capacity-building components of science programmes. The science divide is the basic source of sustained economic difference and poverty. If it is neglected, science creates more poverty, hunger and tragedy in poor countries while creating a few celebrated elites in rich countries. Wherever research is, capacity-building programmes have to accompany it. It is wonderful to see capacity- building components attached to virtually every science programme now existing, such as IHP, GEOSS, IGOS-P, CEOP, GWSP and of course IAHS PUB. The significance of the programme, however, has to be evaluated and assessed not by the number of trainees or degree awardees, but by the exact influence made in their home country and their water management. More precisely, the effects should be assessed by their end product, i.e. the achievement of the development and poverty eradication goal and the realization of efficiency, equality and fairness in water management and sustainability in water use and of the environment.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Hydrology is ‘an aspect of Earth sciences and of water resources’ as stated in IAHS Statutes and Bylaws (IAHS, 2000). Hydrology can serve a wide range of purposes, from pure science to economic development. It can be science for the sake of scientiﬁc knowledge and can be science for societal mission. Although they are usually not so distinct from each other, now, more than ever, mission-driven hydrology is awaited to serve urgent societal needs of development, poverty eradication and environmental protection as described in the MDGs. It is the time for hydrologists to respond to and support the strong political commitment. Hydrology is responsible for providing the scientiﬁc bases of implementation, which includes assessment, planning and

Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 18, 2967–2976 (2004) HYDROLOGY AS A POLICY-RELEVANT SCIENCE 2975 management of freshwater through technologies in prediction, detection, remediation, control, utilization and protection. There are at least two major obstacles, in addition to funding, to achieve the MDGs in the water sector. They are the basic data needed to develop the right plan and the professional personnel to design and implement the plan. There is, in fact, much knowledge and many models already accumulated on hydrological processes and water resource systems. The problem, in general, is not the incompleteness of the models, but rather the lack of data and trained personnel to drive the models to draw the prescription to site-specific problems. More precise observation data, especially human water use and intervention data, are necessary to utilize the available models and theories fully. In contrast to this fact, there is a serious lack of data and the decline of hydrological observation networks all over the world, especially in developing countries. The new GEOSS implementation plan encourages the existing efforts to solve this problem and tries to ensure a sustained observation network. In this very respect, it cannot be overemphasized that, although satellite observations are important and indispensable for describing the global picture, hydrologists cannot deliver much meaningful information to local communities without sufficient ground observations. Water is a local matter that can only be managed using reliable local information. Hydrology has to downscale and translate the global research products into usable local information for real-world river-basin management. This is the hydrologists’ responsibility, as well as a challenging opportunity. All professionals ‘from Space to Earth’ have to form alliances to provide the practically useful local information that projects such as IAHS PUB are aiming at. Another factor impeding the achievement of the MDGs is the lack of professional personnel to utilize the best available knowledge and put it into practice. There is a major lack of professionals across all developing countries. Naturally, science cannot help any problems unless there are enough people who use it. Any observation and research programs should, therefore, be accompanied by capacity-building programmes. Without capacity building, no observation or research projects can contribute to development and eradication of poverty in developing countries. In fact, without capacity building, observation or research projects only contribute to the widening of the divide between the haves and have-nots. It is plausible that many of the current international research programmes, including GEOSS, PUB and GWSP, have capacity-building components well declared. Efficient implementation is awaited. The year of 2003 was the International Year of Freshwater (http://www.wateryear2003.org/). The UN Decade of Action ‘Water for Life’ begins in 2005 (UN, 2004). It is time for hydrologists to work together with a clear sense of mission on policy-relevant hydrology.

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