The year of 2015 will be passed soon and the new year of 2016 is coming. Here I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all WASWAC councilors, advisors, past presidents and all friends who have made great contribution to WASWAC.

In this year, our association has made more great progresses on the foundation we achieved before, which mark WASWAC to be reached the stable development period.

1) The WASWAC has finished all procedures of registration in China. Early this year we received the license from the Ministry of Civil affairs, in which, our association was clear to be an independent NGO academic organization.

After receiving this authorization, Prof. Liu Ning, the vice minister of Ministry of Water Resources, organized a conference to listen the report of our secretariat, and gave detailed comments on key directions of association development in the future, and expressed a keen desire to make WASWAC more influential.

2) Our Journal - International Soil and Water Conservation Research - has achieved great progress form the newborn period to the primary development. So far, we have published 11 issues, which including nearly 100 papers. Since this year, our journal has started the cooperation with Elsevier. It means that all papers published in our Journal could be distributed through a broader network. All papers are available online at :

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/international-soil-and-water-conservation-research/

3) In October we successfully held the International Youth Forum of Soil and Water Conservation (IYFSWC). Thirteen invited speakers, who are all famous scientists from various counties, provided all participants a series of very helpful lectures.

During the forum, we initiated the Outstanding Youth Paper Award. There were 10 excellent young scientists from 6 countries won this award, this has been received high and warm praise from young generation in the scientific community.

By virtue of this occasion, the WASWAC Youth Committee was established, three young researchers have been elected to be the chairman and vice chairmen.

And also, during this forum, we held the WASWAC Council meeting. In this meeting, the preliminary plan for holding the third WASWAC World Conference was presented by prof. Miodrag Zlatic, and was discussed by all participants in details. As the most important event in 2016 for our association, WASWAC World Conference III will be held in Belgrade, Serbia, the time will be on August 22-26, 2016. During the conference, the WASWAC outstanding youth paper award 2016 (DATUM) will be released, 10 outstanding research papers on soil and water conservation by the scientists of 40 years old or younger (by the end of 2016) will be awarded a Certificate and a $1000 (USD) honorarium. We encourage our all young members to participate this conference and to apply for the award.

4) In November, our association has released the position statement about the critical need to implement policies and management practices that conserve soil and water across the world under the climate change background. This statement has been distributed widely including on the COP 21 Paris Climate Summit and has received positive feedbacks.

5) We have created and developed more cooperation with other organizations such as ISCO, SWCS, ESCC, through exchanging face to face. We hope that there will be more opportunities to develop good relationships with other brother associations, and also, more chances to deepen our existent relationships.

6) WASWAC Hot News, as an important platform, published 12 issues this year to report WASWAC new, global environmental events, abstracts for relevant books and papers, job vacancies, meetings announcement, advertisement etc. It was sent to all members every month regularly. All issues can be downloaded in our official website www.waswa.org , where you need to input the username and password, please remember, they are both “waswac”.

In the year of 2016, we will continue to make efforts to WASWAC development, mainly focused on two aspects. One is that to strengthen the self-building of association, and the another is to make WASWAC more influential in the world. We will try to develop more organization members, such as universities, institutes and associations or societies. We will also try to find more suitable ways to join the related international events. For the time being, we are involved in some preparation works to make our journal in the Science Citation Index journal list, we will continue to make our efforts on it next year.

In addition, we recommend all our members to be Belgrade to join our 3rd World Conference, hope to see you all there. Your continuing support for WASWAC will contribute our Association stronger than ever before. We believe that WASWAC will receive more fruits and play more important role in the world.

Finally, with the arrival of 2016, hope our all members all the joys of happiness throughout the prosperous New Year.

Best wishes for you for 2016,

Prof. Li Rui

President of WASWAC

Institute of Soil and Water Conservation MWR-CAS

26 Xinong Rd., Yangling, Shaanxi, China

lirui@ms.iswc.ac.cn

WASWAC Secretariat:

c/o International Research and Training Center on Erosion and Sedimentation (IRTCES), 20 Chegongzhuang Road West, Beijing 100048, P. R. China.