On September 13, Abou Amani, Director of the Division of Water Sciences of UNESCO and Secretary of UNESCO-IHP, visited IRTCES to discuss and exchange views on the priority areas of the ninth phase of UNESCO-IHP, and to deepen the cooperation with the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR) and the IRTCES. Prof. Peng Jing, President of IWHR and Director of IRTCES, met with Mr. Abou Amani and presided over the meeting, while Prof. Pan Qingbin and Prof. Zhang Jianli, Deputy Directors of IRTCES, as well as relevant persons in IRTCES, in International Cooperation Department of IWHR and relevant experts participated in the meeting.

Prof. Peng Jing said that the IWHR and UNESCO have maintained close communication and cooperation for a long time, and the IRTCES that affiliated to IWHR is the first category 2 center in the world jointly established by the Chinese government and UNESCO. Prof. Peng introduced the recent development of IWHR and IRTCES, and exchanged views on the cooperation in the fields of important academic conferences, professional training, open science and data, popularization of science education, water culture, etc. She expected that the two sides would continue to deepen the cooperation, strengthen the dissemination of science and knowledge, and promote the output of substantive results, so as to make contributions to the support of the United Nations sustainable development goals related to water and the ninth phase of the UNESCO-IHP program.

Director Amani thanked the IWHR and IRTCES for the warm reception and congratulated for the fruitful achievements. He said that UNESCO strongly advocates multilateralism and prioritizes support for open science. Sedimentation and soil and water conservation are closely related to production, life and ecology, and knowledge dissemination and open research on sedimentation and soil and water conservation should be further strengthened under the combined influence of global climate change and human activities. He shared the objectives and path of the ninth phase of UNESCO-IHP, and said that the International Sediment Initiative (ISI) undertaken by IRTCES needs to further accumulate global wisdom, focus on knowledge dissemination and popularization of science, and further cultivate the consensus that the conservation and use of sediment, soil and water conservation is the protection of the earth.

The participants discussed the new challenges faced by the world, such as climate change, the sharing of China's experience in water management, UNESCO's requirements for the Flagship Program, the organization and operation management of ISI, UNESCO's partnership, popularization of water science education, and the activities of IRTCES's 40th anniversary next year, and so on.