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Message from Director

Greeting

The eruption of Mt. Eyjafjallajökull of Iceland in mid-April was a major disaster fatally disrupting European air traffic and affecting several millions of people. Among the affected were the members of the 3rd IRDR Scientific Committee held in Paris on 14-16 April. I was lucky to be able to move to Delft by train on the 18th and after seeing many friends at UNESCO-IHE, I could fly back to Japan on the 20th from the Amsterdam Airport via Dubai. It was a real disaster experience for all the IRDR Science Committee members. During the committee meeting, the members congratulated Dr. Jane E. Rovins for her appointment to the executive coordinator of IRDR International Project Office at the Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. We at ICHARM, too, are looking forward to working with her.

On 24-26 May, a delegate from HidroEX visited ICHARM. HidroEX is a new UNESCO Category Ⅱ Center established in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The delegate was headed by Congressman Narcio Rodrigues and accompanied by four others including the former Rector of UNESCO-IHE Richard Meganck. It was a great pleasure to receive such respectable visitors, and we are excited to start collaboration with a sister institute on the other side of the globe in the IFAS early warning system and education program.

The photos I selected for this issue is the 400 m high Nurek Dam, the world’s highest dam in Tajikistan, which I visited on the occasion of the High-level International Conference on a mid-term comprehensive review of Implementation of International Decade for Action “Water for Life, 2005-2015” in Dushanbe, 8-10 June 2010. At the conference, Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad both spoke and called for collaboration on water security. The audience was greatly inspired with the enthusiasm that the two presidents expressed in their speeches.

On 5-9 July 2010, I also participated in the 19th IHP-IGC at UNESCO, Paris. The conference selected three new members from Russia, Cote de Voire and Jamaica for the ICHARM International Advisory Board. The board, now consisting of these three and the other ten, will meet in Tokyo and Tsukuba on 28-29 September. We thank their continued willingness to give us insightful advice on our activities and are looking forward to seeing them all in Japan.


July 2010
Kuniyoshi Takeuchi
Director of ICHARM

(From ICHARM Newsletter No.17.)

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