The online Water Youth Congress was co-organized by UNESCO Centre on Integrated and Multidisciplinary Water Resources Management (CIMWRM), hosted by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), in Greece, in collaboration with UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme (IHP), the Youth Delegates to the World Water Council (YDWWC) and the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR).
The young professionals (Yps) would have the opportunity to present their projects/research and also promote new innovative ideas for action (in 3-5 min). Meanwhile, they would have the opportunity to discuss and get some feedback from senior members(mentors) as well as to network with other YPs around the world and establish a connection with the 9th World Water Forum while disseminating the outcomes of the 9th WWF.
The interactive event explored and discuss themes which revolved around:
- Water-related disasters and climate crisis: hazards like floods and droughts require integrated water management, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction.
- The “job” system in the Meta COVID-19 era: identify opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship in the water sector, skills necessary for the new “digital” era since COVID-19 and interconnected water challenges of the future which highlight the interdisciplinarity of water with almost all sciences.
- Resilience of societies and “digital” communication and cooperation: the climate crisis is a threat to all societies, to improve the capacity of adaptation and recovery from extreme events is our mandate as water professionals. Digital based communication and cooperation, such as web-based collaborative engineering, is paramount to achieve this goal.
- Management of groundwater resources, the “invisible water”: properly protecting groundwater resources is crucial against poverty, the creation of decent jobs, sustainable development and certainly contributes to increase the resilience of the societies and economies to climate change.
- Water-related issues of inclusiveness (culture / gender / indigenous peoples): to pretend that a sectorial standpoint can be universal is to secure old clichés. We need the support of science to solve water-related problems and its universality is not conceivable without the inclusion of all the parts.
The Congress had parallel sessions on the above-mentioned themes and after the end of the sessions “virtual spiritual coffee breaks” were provided where discussions took place among participants and mentors. Mentors were experts from academia and water enterprises/agencies, etc.
There was given the opportunity to have “be to be” meetings with mentors as well.
There are e-proceedings of the event and even the possibility of publication to peer review scientific journal under conditions to be specified.
Download the e-proceeding from here
By Clicking this link you will be able to download the proceedings and the presentations of the congress. Click here
By visiting this YouTube channel you can find the recordings of the congress: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU13V6YAYSBSSGdeQoZXfTQ
