ICWRER day 2

The second day of the International Conference on Water Resources and Environment Research in Kyoto featured two keynote speeches. The first, from Prof. Hubert Savenije from the Dutch Delft University of Technology, touched upon drought models and root zone storage. He explained how different drought models led to opposite results for the Netherlands, and a local model often functioned better than a global one. He further set out his theory how most of the traditional ground storage models did not account for root storage correctly. These models assume that plants would use the entire soil depth to grow roots in, when in practice this was not the optimal growth strategy for plants. In fact, especially in moist areas, there is no need for plants to have deep roots as they can already gather enough moisture from the top soil layer, and then invest more in growing above ground. 

The second keynote speech was given by Prof. Toshio Koike, from the University of Tokyo and director of ICHARM. He covered "Creating Integrated Scientific Knowledge for Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Change Adaptation and Sustainable Development". In a following session he presented the goals of the International Flood Initiative for the Asian and Pacific Region, the progress of which you can track on the website here.

In the afternoon James Nickum, editor of the journal Water International, chaired a session on Water and Environment Management in Urban Areas, and presented on "Sustainability Dilemmas in Global Cities". A further presentation from Mahua Mukherjee on greening urban spaces showed an example of a restored tributary in the Netherlands.