The 12th IWHR-KICT joint seminar was held on June 16, 2015 at the headquarters of IWHR, Beijing. IWHR President Dr. Kuang Shangfu welcomed the Korean delegation led by KICT President Prof. Lee Tai-Sik, and chaired the opening session of the seminar. IWHR Vice Presidents Dr. Jia Jinsheng and Liu Zhiping also attended the seminar.
Dr. Kuang congratulated on the 12 years of fruitful exchanges and cooperation between IWHR and KICT, highlighted by the annual bilateral seminar. He expressed confidence in the newly signed free trade agreement between China and South Korea in further spurring on bilateral cooperation in broader fields. Also, he mentioned the new philosophy on water management put forward by Chinese President Xi Jinping -- “water conservation always prioritized, socio-economic development matched with local resource carrying capacity, adopting a systematic approach, and harnessing both government and market forces”. Dr. Kuang believed that the two institutes, sharing similar missions of water development, had more reasons than ever to closely cooperate with each other.
Prof. Lee Tai Sik expressed gratitude to IWHR’s consistent efforts for the bilateral cooperation, and to its involvement in the 7th World Water Forum just concluded in South Korea in March. Prof. Lee shared his hopes that closer exchanges on key academic and technological issues could be enhanced, new areas of cooperation including disaster relief be tried, and young professionals be given more opportunities on such an exchange platform.
IWHR Vice President Dr. Liu Zhiping and KICT Director of Hydro Science and Engineering Research Institute Dr. Kim Hyeon-Jun chaired the seminar sessions.
The seminar was started by institute introductions (research strategies and scopes), followed by presentations on four topics of water resources, sediment, ecology and geotechnics.
For post-seminar technical tours, the KICT delegation visited laboratories of water environment, structures and materials and Daxing Experimental Base of IWHR, as well as the Beijing-section of South-to-North Water Diversion Project Middle Route and Yongding River.
