 Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and a warm welcome to all, wherever you are. Thank you all for joining us for this inaugural webinar session, organized by the IWA's newest specialist group, Sustainable Coastal and Estuarine Development. My name is Siba Siba-Kumar, I am an associate professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. I'm also the inaugural chair of this specialist group. The agenda for today is that after my welcome message, we'll do a poll. And our moderator, Professor Fangian, will go through the housekeeping and introduce the speakers. We have two well-renowned speakers and followed by Q&A and I'll come back to close the seminar. Some of you may be aware that we are previously the International Association for Coastal Reservoir Research for the last six years and has now become the IWA specialist group on Sustainable Coastal and Estuarine Development. And this happened in March this year. There are over 32 mega cities in the world, which are a population more than 10 million and 70% of them are in the coastal areas serving a population of over 400 million people. So this type of large-scale urbanization has significant impact on coastal ecosystems. At the same time, they also require sufficient amount of clean water, energy and other water front and other infrastructures. So our specialist group aim is to contribute to solving these issues associated with sustainable coastalness to re-development. In this regard, we are running an international conference, maybe in the next slide. So this international conference is going to take place in Changshao at Hohai University between the 6th to the 9th of November, where we will have 14 well-renowned keynote speakers, 10 invited lectures, one full-day interactive workshop followed by a technical tour of the world's largest coastal reservoir, situated in the Yangtze Estuarine, Shanghai. So I hope some of you will be able to join this conference, although the abstract deadline has passed 15th of September, if someone really want to send an abstract, you certainly can contact the organizers. So with that introduction, I will pass it on to our moderator, Professor Fang-Yen, to start the webinar proceedings. Thank you, Fang-Yen. Yeah. Hello, everyone. Can you hear me? Yes. I hope all of you are well and staying safe. Good morning, good afternoon and also good evening to our Estinese speakers and all the participants from wherever you are. Welcome to the IWA, OK? IWA, Spatially Goods Webinar for today. And before we proceed, we have some webinar information that I would like to inform you. This webinar will be recorded and this will be made available on Demands for the IWA NetPlus and with presentation slides as well as on other information. And the speakers are responsive for the securing copyright permissions and for any of the works they will present of which they are not the legal copyright holders. The opinions from the IWA will be hypothesis, conclusions, conclusion and also the recommendation contained in the presentation and other materials are the sole responsibility of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect any of the IWA opinions here. So I would like to invite all the participants later on. You can ask the questions. You can either use the chat box. You can use to provide your general request or any of the interactive activities. Or you can ask questions to our speakers later. Please use these buttons on your right hand side to send any of the questions to our panelists as well as to our speakers. We will try our best to answer all your questions later on at the end of the sections. Next. So this is our moderators and also the speakers. I would like to introduce to you our associate professor Mutu Kumara Maru Sivakubara from University of Orengong, where he also just to speak with us a few minutes ago. And myself, Fang Yantil from the University of Noltingham, Malaysia. I will be one of the moderators for today. And also we have the emeritus professor Arthur Manit for the technology University of Delft, Netherlands, as well as we have the Lokta F3 Rama for UNESCO Florence. Next. So before we start our programs, let me introduce our speakers here for the first speakers. And before that, I also like to introduce that this IWA Webinar Series is one of the best platform for us to share knowledge and also experience to ensure a successful implementation of the sustainable, ensuring and also the coastal developments. And we would like to see more participants to join us, especially on the questions and answers sections later on. And today Webinar, we are going to discern to a very interesting technical topics from our speakers here, Professor Arthur Manit. And I will read out his CV, where it's a very long CV. Professor Arthur Manit is emeritus professor of the Hydro Engineering and Environmental Hydro Informatics at the IHE Delft Institute of Water and Education and Delft University of Technology. He received his Master of Science degree in civil engineering from Delft University back in 1976, which is quite a long time ago, and science degree in hydrodynamics and coastal engineering from Master's Institute of Technologies in 1980s. He was employed at Delft Hydrox and also, as well as IHE Delft, seen quite sometimes more than 30 years. He worked in a various field of river, coastal and offshore engineering and became director of strategic research and development at Delft University in 1995. At IHE Delft, he served as a professor of environmental hydroinformatics in 1997s, as well as a chair professor of the Hydrox Engineering and River Basin Development Groups in 2010. As well as he's also the head of the water size and engineering developments from 2011 to 2015, he hold numbers of international appointments and awards, including visiting professor at the Roa Institute of Hydro Research, as well as a Aijian professor at the Chinese Academy of Science, visiting professor at Sichuan University in Tentu Honorary Professor at Nanjing Hydro Research Institute, China. Professor Manette was the chair of the roger organizing committee of the 36 IAHR World Congress held in 2015 in Delft, the heart in the heart of the Netherlands. He's also the IAHR Lifetime Members 2016 and Honorary Members 2019, as well as the member of IWA Special Group on Sustainable Coaster and Assuring Development. Without further ado, I would like to invite our professor, Manette, to deliver his speech and also his lectures for today. Thank you very much, Fang Yan. What I would like to share with the audience today in the next 20 minutes or so are some experiences from the Netherlands and the development, notably from, let's say, great infrastructure to nature-based solutions to achieve sustainable coastal and estuarine development. So I would like to let's see if I have the control. There we go. I would like to recall that if we look at the extent of natural disasters as reported in the literature, we see that it's been growing very rapidly and this is only to the beginning of this millennium. But if you follow the news, Libya, for example, you can see that there's a rapid increase in disasters and the worst is yet to come, I'm afraid. Also, if we look at the damages of floods, just to have one component, we can see that it's been worldwide widespread death tolls, even up to the tens or hundreds of thousands and in terms of economic loss and damages, it's really billions of whatever currency you prefer. So there's a great need to remedy that or to secure that we have, that we are positioned to deal with that because if in terms of GDP, if we look at the impact of coastal floods, for example, it could be between, say, 4% or 10% of the GDP, which is substantial and may affect economies for decades, if not more. Just to share with you some recent coastal floods as they happen. As you can see, they're there to a large extent in the east coast of the US but also in Asia and to some extent also in Europe. So these are considerable numbers of vast areas that are affected for a long period of time, which means that we have to find ways to secure coastal protection, living conditions, water supply, in short, to secure global water security. If we look at protection levels, there may be a few things to note. On this picture in the upper left, upper corner, say, it's the economy and the protection level for New York. Now you may notice that then on the horizontal axis, there is a protection level of 1 in 100 years and the potential loss up on the vertical axis is considerable, as we have seen in the recent past. If, on the other hand, we take the city of Rotterdam, you see that the protection level in the Netherlands there is 100 fold, 1 in 10,000, moving up to 1 in 100,000 for some parts of the Netherlands, because the major part is below sea level and we cannot afford having any economic losses or recovering from that. Just to focus, and as I mentioned, my objective is to share with you some lessons learned from the Netherlands so that in other deltas you could make use of that. You can see in the right figure that the Dutch delta is largely three rivers, maybe four. The Rhine Meuse estuary coming from Switzerland, Germany, France, notably. So it's at the end of the river stretch and you can see in the left picture the country of the Netherlands where the blues indicate it's below sea level. So the deepest location in the Netherlands is even 6.7 meters below sea level, which is where the water will go if dikes fail, as you can imagine. The flood prone areas is notably in the west, which is the economic area of the Netherlands. And it's about 10 million people that live in that area. Some parts are protected. Other parts are very flood prone. And it's a considerable, say, differences in levels of the land levels as we have here. It's not only that it always was like that. It's not, but I will not elaborate too much on that, but you should realize that if you develop coastal reservoirs or polders, the land is likely to subside, notably if it's a peaty soil. If it's sandy soil, it may stay, but peaty soil. So in the four centuries that the Netherlands has been developed and developing polder, notably in the west, some of these polders over 400 years have been lowering the ground level for four meters. So roughly a meter per century, four meters below what it was in the past. And that goes on in other parts of the world as well. Let's say Jakarta, for example. If you pump groundwater, you will pump yourself to the bottom. So it's not necessarily the Netherlands, but it's notable. And here you can see some impression if there were no water management in the Netherlands. This is what the western part would look like, and you can see Delft in the lower corner to the left. Part of it may be above sea level, but the other parts may be flooded. Skippel Airport, for those of you who have traveled through there, would be completely underwater because it's five meters below sea level. So my main point here is water management and flood protection is a must in the Netherlands, not a luxury or something we occasionally do. If you don't do it, there's no Netherlands. It's that simple. So that's why we have to. And that's being done. If you look at the major floods over the past century, say you can see various coastal floods in various parts, depending on wind direction over the several centuries. Major ones who can see here, this one in 1916 near the Amsterdam area, that triggered the Dutch government to create a large closure dam up in the northern part. By that time, that was achieved. The next disaster came in the southwest, Western Delta, 1953, which caused major casualties and a lot of problems. So at that time, the Dutch government said, well, we have to do something in order to sustain, because we cannot remedy or repair after coastal floods. And the Dutch Delta design that was set up there was to secure, say flood protection. Because you can see with and without flood protection, the coastline of the Netherlands would have been vastly different. You probably are aware, if not it's easy to Google, but there are major hydraulic structures in place in the Netherlands to secure, to flood risk, say. And the reason for me to point out this one on the eastern's health is that in some essence, say it's one of the first structures that allows for environmental issues. Originally it was designed to be closed off the estuary completely, but because of economic constraints and fisheries, notably, it became a semi open storm surge barrier, which indeed tripled the cost of the structure, but also resulted in considerable engineering experience on how to deal and how to develop, say, solutions that take into account the environment and the sustainable development rather than a rigid change in regime. There's another one near Rotterdam, and this is a picture every year. It's being tested. These are, in essence, to floating Eiffel Towers. There's twice as much steel in each of the barriers than in the Eiffel Tower. And they float out, and they can close off the Rotterdam and protect the Rotterdam Harbor. And now these, of course, are major engineering works and what the Netherlands are famous for, but it's not the motto of my presentation. My motto is that perspectives are changing on coastal reservoirs and delta development. So just to have some highlights, now there's more attention and awareness on reintroducing tides and having a more natural regime in order to secure water quality rather than water quantity, because flood protection is one, but water supply and living conditions, agriculture are equally important. So there's a considerable trend towards working with nature, building with nature rather than opposing. That means that nowadays the estuary in the southwest of the Netherlands is reconsidered and works are going on to, say, remedy the disadvantages of permanent closures in order to have more attractive living conditions and to secure water quality, as I mentioned before. So to share with you a long tradition in the Netherlands of focusing on flood risk management, stringent safety standards, predict and control the regime, but the emerging paradigm is go towards integrated and adaptive approach in governance terms. Water governance is a very important component in the water sector nowadays. It's been referred to by Bill Clinton, I believe, as the polder model, which means a lot of stakeholders getting together to agree on future development. If we look at the Dutch Delta, this is a sketch, say, of the sandy coast and the sandy protection level, but a PT hinterland. You can see that we are subject to sea level rise, decreased river discharges, salinity intrusion, land subsidence, more intense rainfall, as we experience almost everywhere in the world, increased river discharge, increased erosion, and more pressure on spatial and economic development. How to deal with that in a small country like the Netherlands at the end of the Rhine Muse system? That's a question that Dutch committee, Delta committee, has been addressing. And in essence, the question is, should we leave or should we stay? And at what cost? I would say that this is also in the Netherlands a new trend of thinking. It's not post-disaster remedy, the effects, but anticipating future changes and anticipating scenarios and, say, looking at the sustainability of the coastal and estuarine area in the Netherlands, which is the model of the IWA specialist group. Living with water, working with water was the title of the report by this committee, and it looked at various parts of the Netherlands and had a longer term perspective, half a century, a whole century, the end of next century. What can we expect in case of sea level rise? One meter we can deal with, five meters, maybe difficult, 10 meters. We have to change urban planning and change the country's topography, if you like. So recreating the estuary towards a more natural, more nature-based way is ongoing, as we speak. It's not urgent, but it's necessary to anticipate. The same is with the sustainability of the coastal reservoir in the center part of the Netherlands, the Lake Issel. How much water can be stored there for a dry period, which is definitely one of the effects that we are experiencing, also some part of this summer, but certainly last summer. How to secure water supply in case of droughts is really being investigated in great detail by Dutch research institutes and government agencies. So flood control from hard closures to more open structures, land reclamation, not necessarily only for agriculture, but also for urbanization and nature development. Coastal reservoirs, reintroduction of islands for bird life and natural development. These are all ongoing things and the same on priorities and operating rules to allow for saltwater intrusion. Having brackish areas is some development that is presently taking place for fish population, for safeguarding the natural environment. You can see here this picture. You said that living with water requires a new spatial concept in spatial planning. It's not trying to push it out, but trying to live with the water and make use of the water also for storage. Without going into much detail, my take-home message here would be you have to adapt and not manage in a master plan for the next thousand years or so. That's not a wise thing to do and not the right thing to do, but you have to identify pathways and tipping points and logical developments that could take place, avoid overinvestment and combine with other agendas like redoing cities or urban maintenance and so. If we take river discharges in example, if we know that the peak flows will increase, we have to identify what is a threshold, what is a tipping point and then work backwards from there to see how long does it take to remedy or to take measures and this is decades rather than weeks, for example. And then at some point decisions have to be taken in the Netherlands called delta decisions. They're taken by the House of Commons, by the government, investing in certain measures depending on the priorities. So these are all ways to not wait for the disaster to come, but anticipating and taking measures. In terms of economic values, you could say that rather than having large investments in a linear way for a long time, we would prefer to tailor the investments towards what is really needed and then taking into account no regrets that need to be done and that way it's economically feasible as well. This by the way is a trend that we see in flood research in the European Union on a wide basis, moving towards adaptive management, not master planning rigidly, but adaptive and taking into account some flexibility and I would like to end with quoting Professor Hübsar von Ney, who had a keynote presentation in the coastal reservoirs conference some time ago where he said, well, it's important if you do any designs and coastal reservoirs to introduce flexibility in the design because design considerations may change in future and you would like to be flexible to adapt to these changing conditions. So to paraphrase Hubert's message, my message would be work towards nature-based solutions for sustainable coastal and estuarine development. And that from Yan is pretty much my last slide. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for Professor Maynett. I think this is a quite interesting lectures and also talk that can newly deliver to us and we can see that you have tell us about how can we work towards the nature-based solutions, especially for the sustainable coastal and estuarine developments. And I can see that we combine with your guides just now together with Professor Hubert's. We are definitely, especially for all the engineers, we should be more flexibility in terms of doing design based on the nature-based solutions. Without, we are going to follow the second speaker. Thank you very much again. We thank you very much for Professor Arthur Maynett. And we have the next speakers, which is Professor Rama FU-3. Okay, let me read out the CV here. We have a Dr. Rama FU-3 and she is from UNESCO and Dr. Rama FU-3 is currently a chief of sections for capacity development and water family coordinations in the division of water size intergovernmental hydrolyzical program, IHP UNESCO HQ in Paris. So she is responsible for eco hydrology, water quality and water education related activities for Goverry. And she was previously the Deputy Regional Coordinators at the Global Water Partnership Southeast Asia, GWP Southeast Asia based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Prior to that, she worked for more than 15 years at the Institute of Environment and Development under the National University of Malaysia as a visiting professor as well as have extensive research and academic experience, especially in the view of integrated water resources, sustainable ecosystem management, sustainability size as well as watershed and community-based water management and multi-state water engagement at various levels. So without further ado, I would like to invite Dr. Rama FU-3 to deliver to us his topics on eco hydrology, implementation for the sustainable estuary and coastal water in terms of the UNESCO aspect. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much, Dr. Teo. It is a privilege for me to be here today with all of you and to share some work related to eco hydrology implementation focused especially for sustainable estuaries and coastal water to achieve water security, which is in line with the UNESCO ISP-9, which is the current phase of ISP 2022 until 2029. So my name is Rama FU-3. I am currently a Chief of Section for Capacity Development and Water Family Coordination within the Division of Water Sciences UNESCO ISP and also in just for specific program on eco hydrology. So to give you a little bit overview about UNESCO ISP, some of you know about these UNESCO intergovernmental hydrological programs, which actually started since 1975, the ISP-1. And then you can see the evolution for the ISP-2-3. And now we are at the ISP-9, which the team focused on science for water security in the changing environment. As we talk about eco hydrology today, eco hydrology is also have its evolution within the ISP phases. And we start our eco hydrology approach since 1996, which is during the ISP-5. And then the evolutions of the ISP itself from starting focusing eco hydrological processes in small basins. And then focus also after that the integrative science to solve issues surrounding water environment and people. And again for during the ISP-7, another focus of eco hydrology, mostly on sustainability, which launching the eco hydrological demonstration project at the time in various countries also. And then for the next ISP-8, we will focus on the integrative science from molecular to basin scale. And at this stage also, we do the revitalization of eco hydrology program. And now during the ISP-9, we focus specifically on eco hydrology for water security, which is in line with the ISP-9 team. And also we want to promote the implementation of eco hydrology in the designated sites, where UNESCO has the various designated sites, such as Biosphere Reserve, Wall Heritage Site, and also Global JOPA. So this is among our focus during the ISP-9. And specifically during ISP-9, also we have five priority areas, if you can see here in the middle, focus on water governance, water education, scientific research and innovation, bringing data and knowledge gap also on IWRM. And also plus another three additional cross-sectoral group, which focus on, I mean cross-sectoral with this all five priority areas, focus on hydrological system, river, climate risk, and water put energy nexus, also on groundwater and human settlement. And last but not least, we focus on the eco hydrology and water quality. So this is where eco hydrology play an important role, even in this ISP-9, which we want to implement eco hydrology approach in the catchment scales in various catchment areas in all countries or member states to get a benefit for implementing nature-based solutions of which through the specific approach we call eco hydrology. So what is UNESCO eco hydrology approach? So we established this eco hydrology approach since 1996 as you shown in the evolution of eco hydrology because this is due to the urgent need to accelerate the implementation of water-related SDG. So we need to use the ecosystem properties as innovative management tools, which is also a nature-based solution approach. So by using this nature-based solution approach, we will address the issues related to water management, including how to improve water quantity and water quality by reducing the pressure or impact to ecosystem at all scales. So we promote our approach to do this through a dual regulation, which is water and biota interplay, which also can be translated into nature-based solution approach, and on how we want to do this or to promote this approach through our UNESCO water family and also the MOSAT network towards achieving these water security challenges. So what is our UNESCO water family? As we work with our various member states, so ISP also have about 172 ISP national committees. I think you know maybe one of, you are also part of this one national committee from specific countries, and we have also around 70 water-related chairs and unity network, which also supporting us in implementing our work related to water and also for equity. Also another 17 ISP-flexive initiative and the secretariat, which is us here in ISP secretariat. Also our various regional hydrologists and science officers in field office of UNESCO, and another 30 water specialist center or category two center, which ISP is or DEF is one of our water specialist center of category two listed, and also water assessment program, which is part of our UNESCO water family. And specifically on ecohidrology, we also have our sort of from our ecohidrology family, which we have currently around four UNESCO category two center focusing on ecohidrology, which is European center on ecohidrology, African center on ecohidrology, Asia Pacific center on ecohidrology, and another one in Brazil, I'm Paraguay. And then we also have our around six UNESCO chair, which based in universities in various countries, which focus on ecohidrology. So this is how we work together with this water family or ecohidrology family to help us to implement various approach in ecohidrology. So by definition, ecohidrology is the holistic approach of the analysis understanding of processes and regulation, which is dual regulation of water and biota interplay. So we use this dual regulation between biota and hydrology, which is also scientific field inside the sciences of ecology and hydrology, and specifically studies about interaction between water bodies and different ecosystems. So it is a transdisciplinary and applied science also subdiscipline of hydrology that seek to understand the ecological process controlled by the hydrology cycle. So we use the common definition by defined by Professor Zalowski, which is also our chair of the scientific advisory committee of ecohidrology in UNESCO. And as the concept is, I mean, there is evolution of the hydro ecohidrology itself. So the concept also evolved from only by dual regulation of biota and hydrology. But now we want to focus on the to achieve the improvement on the four elements, which is WBSR, to improve water quality and water quantity, also to enhance biodiversity in the catchment area, and then to improve also the ecosystem services in the catchment, and last but not least to improve the resilience to climate and impact. So this is our main objective for implementing this ecohidrology approach. And it can be done through CME, which is culture and education as UNESCO work on the not only scientific approach, approach aspect, but also on the culture and education aspect. So this is how important the importance of social elements to improve in improvement ecohidrology for improving the scientific related issues. And now it is also we add another element, which is law, policy and governance, to make sure the sustainability of the initiative that we have conducted in or implemented in the catchment. So we develop ecohidrology as a transdisciplinary scientific approach to achieve water quality improvement and also biodiversity enhancement and sustainable development by using this understanding of relationship between a hydrological and biological process. And so it is also integrative transdisciplinary science, which providing nature of the solution, not only for reduction of impact, but also enhancement of the catchment sustainability potential. And why ecohidrology is important, because it is aimed to find solution oriented method by reducing anthropogenic impact and restoring aquatic ecosystem. So by implementing ecohidrology, we will achieve the environmental integrated solution, which is through restoring and maintaining the long-term ecosystem, and then natural adaptable solution, because all of which are natural through increasing or improving the current capacity of the ecosystem. Also, it will be a long-term sustainable solution, because it will create sustainable solution for water management. And also eco-friendly and local solution, because it is not as expensive as other methods or concrete things or other things. And it will improve society connection with water bodies when we have beautiful or good nature or our ecosystem. This is just to highlight to you, there is a recent publication by nature on ecohidrology, which referring to our UNESCO ISP ecohidrology work, which already more than 20 years work, which focus on the governance aspect, which is a radical reshaping of the water governance. That is an important element of ecohidrology also. And related to ecohidrology, which use or mimic this process to play a key role in enriching biodiversity, and also not forgotten the the society element, because we need to bring the necessity of involving the decision-making processes. So these three elements is the diagnosis of key measures by nature as an output of UN water conference recently we conducted on ecohidrology. And it's also some of the acknowledgment of the ecohidrological work that UNESCO have been doing. And in terms of the approach of ecohidrology, UNESCO currently focus on this or categories for approach or element of ecohidrology, which can be done through environmental flow or hydrological flow, which is common approach done by many peoples. And also through by using phyto technology, using plants or vegetation to implement ecohidrology. Also use through fauna technology by using specific spaces to absorb pollution or to reduce the impact and also through ecohidrological infrastructure. So this is the current for ecohidrology methodology that we use in our demonstration site. And the implementation itself at the catchment scale can be at the basin or city or urban area, also in inland wetlands and in the rivers and lakes. And last but not least also in estuaries or coastal water, which is the aspect that I will share with all of you today. And we need to also bring people in the implementation of ecohidrology. So the stakeholder is important to be part of this ecohidrology implementation, including local stakeholders and community, state and national agencies, various researchers, various partners and donors and other supporters, which need to bring them, all of them on board to make sure the implementation of ecohidrology will be sustainable. This is one of the examples of implementation of ecohidrology in Malaysia, for example, where Putrajaya Lake and Wetland is one of the ecohidrology demonstration sites since 2010. So we use wetlands for improving water quality. So it's achieved the W element here. And then at the same time, when we have good water quality and good water quantity, the biodiversity in the wetland is also improved. So we achieved another objective, which is for biodiversity enhancement. And when we get this beautiful water, good biodiversity, we also improve the ecosystem services in this area. So there's another objective. And when this implementation is already creating a good environment of the lake and wetlands area, so it's also becoming resilient to climate and impact. This is another objective or main implementation of ecohidrology that we want to achieve. And the implementation also mixed through the culture and education where in Putrajaya, Malaysia, we also have been conducted before this many or series of community participation and awareness program. And also it is supported by law, policy and governance in Putrajaya by having a local Agenda 21 or also another document towards low carbon density, which make sure or ensuring the maintenance or conservation of ecosystem towards achieving this specific law, policy and governance in Putrajaya. So it will improve the WBS Act, CE and LPG, which is our component elements for ecohidrology for sustainable water management in Putrajaya. And how we work, as I mentioned, we also promote this ecohidrology since 2010 through specific approach. We work on ecohidrology since 1996, but we start the implementation of ecohidrology demonstration, the establishment of ecohidrology demonstration site since 2010 by applying ecohidrological solution in various catchments. So since last year we make annual call, we start to make an annual call for new ecohidrology demonstration site because we want to promote this ecohidrology approach more and to make sure many other catchment area will be joined, our network to have more impact to the community and also to the global impact to all countries. So currently UNESCO have 37 demonstration sites in 26 countries, as you can see here, five in Africa, 11 in Asia, 12 in Europe, and around nine in Latin America and Caribbean. And if you can see the different color here, green shown the implementation of ecohidrology at the basin or the city, and blue shown the implementation at the river and lakes areas. And yellow is implementation of ecohidrology at the wet inland wetlands, and red color is implementation of ecohidrology at the estuaries and coastal water. So this is what I want to share today, which currently UNESCO have for coastal estuaries or coastal ecohidrology, which is, you can see here, this four red color, I also list down here. So Victoria Lake and wetlands, sorry Victoria Ponds wetlands in Bahamas, Castela Bay in Croatia, Guadena estuaries in Portugal, and also Omele, Garmele Lagoon in Tunisia. So just a quick share with all of you about Guadena estuaries in Portugal. So there is a development of the Guadena, of the, what are the aquifers there in this Guadena estuaries, and it gives the impact of the ecosystem, like reduction of the, by various habitat or for example, fish in this area, and many others environmental impact. And they use the nature-based solution approach to deal with these issues, such as by establishing the flat pulse value to control this productivity of the planktonic diversity to reduce harm, so this is among the opus, and also they use the fauna technology opus by using the bivalve density to absorb the pollution in this area. Also planktonic technology, which is by using wetlands to restore wetlands to sustain the nursery function in this area, and also using the environmental flow to establish volume and timing for them discharge to restore river, flume, and covee nursery function. So this is among the opus conducted in Guadena estuaries in Portugal, which is one of our equidology demonstration site in Portugal. Another equidology demonstration site in Castelabai, Postia, there is also many issues related to environmental in this Castelabai, and they use implement specific project called Integral Project of Castelabai Protection, where they conducted the ecological project in this area, and it improved the protection and preservation of water quality in this area, also saved development of economy and maintenance of improvement and achieved level of environmental protection. That is another example, also another example for ecological approach in coastal area, which is in Victoria ponds wetlands in Bahamas, where they have a problem related to mangrove reduction or degradation, and they conduct a large program, which is a restoration of Victoria ponds called Ramsar Caribbean Wetlands Initiative by having specific ponds wetlands ponds in the nearby coastal area. So the water in this coastal area will be filtered before entering the coastal area. So this is another approach implemented by another demonstration site related to coastal in Bahamas, and this is quite recently, we have another demonstration site in Tunisia, which is Gar El Mele Lagoon. Their study focused on physical chemical and environmental evolution, so these colleagues in Tunisia implement an observed battery of the coastal area by using specific, by specific plan, I think they use bamboo here, so the implementation of this Omeri Observatory to reduce the impact that they have related to the ecosystem in these coastal areas also, by using natural approach, and it's already implemented and it shows good impact for the ecosystem and also fast water restoration in this area. So this is among few good examples for the equidology demonstration site in coastal or estuaries areas in our, I mean, four countries. And as I mentioned earlier, UNESCO also promote the equidology approach within UNESCO designated site, which is UNESCO best free reserve, UNESCO World Heritage Site, and UNESCO Global Geographic. So we are continuing this promoting because we want to implement the good example of equidology opus in these specific areas. And also we do the various promotion of the program, such as through various capacity building program like workshop or trainings for input water management related to equidology. So currently, since at least since 2022 and 2023, we have been implemented around 26 equidology workshops around the world. And we focus on, we also promoting this equidology opus in around 11 UNESCO designated sites in these countries. And for around 45 members that involve or get benefit through this implementation and more than 100 experts participated or involved in these programs. And as you know, also UNESCO work on the promoting equidology approach in all regions. So we have implementation in European and North America and also in the Africa region, in the Latin America and Caribbean, also quite recently in Asia Pacific, which we have our session in China, which I'll just come back last week on China. And we also promote the equidology for youth. So we encourage youth participation for, for, I mean, to get involved with our program and to support our equidology initiative through joining our equidology emerging professional global network or APGM. And also another program for youths, which we have the master program on Erasmus Mundus in applied equidology, which currently implementing in this four concert team of university in Portugal, in Belgium, in Germany, and also in Poland. So these four universities are joined effort and supported by UNESCO ASP to implement master of Erasmus Mundus started in 2021 until now, which we will have the launching of the third batch of this master program next two weeks in early October. So for those interested, especially youth or young people, you can also apply for this master on equidology in this university. And as we promote our equidology initiative, we launch the call of equidology demonstration site as I mentioned also earlier. So the deadline for this year is just finished because the call start in from June until August. So for those of you who are interested can join for next year call, which will be open in June. So welcome to join us. And I would like to encourage all of you also to establish the new equidology demonstration site or promote the nature-based solution of which in your specific catchment areas. And if you are interested also can explore new UNESCO water related chairs and category to center on equidology. And to strengthen the youth equidology network because we want to bring more youth in as part of our work. And welcome for further collaboration and partnership in all water related activities. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Dr. Rahman of FA3, which is an interesting topic, especially on the topic on eco hydrology. And we have this one to our first speaker just now on the nature-based solutions as well as the second speaker on the eco hydrology. We have a complete set of the nature-based solutions actually for the sustainable cost and ensuring developments. So we are now come to the Q&A discussion sections. I would like to open to everyone. If you have any questions please raise your question in the chat box. As well as if you have any question you want to voice out you can raise your hand then I can invite you to ask the questions. For this moment maybe I will read out a few questions here from our chat box here. And we have also Professor Arthur have answered quite many of the questions offline where I think all the participants you can access to the Q&A chat box and where that will be a tell you about the questions and also the answer. So I will read out one of the questions here from our one of the participants from Momat Zin. How do we foresee some of the nature-based solution long-term impact on the sustainability on carbon footprints? For example, seaweed farming as a nature-based solution is good to contribute towards sustainability and reducing carbonization for the shop turns but it is also reverse long-term impacts. Is there any guideline about what to choose and what not in the nature-based solutions? Maybe I would like to invite our speakers any one of you if you would like to answer these questions here. Well I'm happy to address that Fong-Yen if I may. It's obvious that there's no universal answer like we should do this and not that and the other thing. These are items to investigate and they require studies depends on the local conditions but in general I think the importance of nature-based solutions is to take the natural developments into account in your engineering design. It's not so that we can rely on natural developments or nature-based approaches only that when we do a design whether it's constructing coastal reservoir or dams or whatever is needed for flood protection for example. We may want to think of the natural development of coastline whether it's sustainable or whether the coastline will retreat, whether sandy beaches can be used rather than concrete dams and these types of components depend on the local conditions maybe different in the Netherlands and in Bangladesh for example just to name two deltas but this is part of the research which is ongoing. The main message is take into account the natural development and nature natural coastline development for example before you start interfering with. That's great Professor Arthur Meditz and okay we have any other questions from the participants here? Yeah we have one more question from Professor Roger Faakona okay he's asking about to what extent can nature-based solutions meet the high safety standards especially against flooding as a disaster that are being used in the Netherlands maybe this question is direct to Professor Arthur Meditz. Sure that's a very important question the short answer is it cannot just by itself there's no way that say extreme events can be remedied by nature-based solutions only so it's absolutely necessary to develop engineering ways whether it's storm surge barriers or closure dams or whatever because that's needed to provide the safety levels that are required in the Netherlands. So the way and the challenge is to develop that in such a way that it's under non-extreme conditions also securing the water quality issues and the living conditions I would say rather so it's a blend I would say the the the challenges to find an engineering blend between safety and the environment that would be my answer there. Thank you very much Arthur and I think we also listened to our second speaker of Dr Rama F3 just now regarding on one of the project side in Putra Jaya maybe we would like to invite Rama F3 you can you explain a little bit more about this project and how this significantly affect our especially on the eco hydrology aspect for the closer and also ensuring developments but anyway this is just inland lake I am not sure maybe the contributions will be not so much compared to any of the assuring developments or closer developments yeah Dr F3. Yeah okay thanks but I will answer this and also maybe in line with the first question just now which mentioning how to to make sure the sustainability this is actually why we introduced the eco hydrology approach it is not just a natural resolution approach but if we call it as advanced natural resolution because in order to to get this eco hydrology implemented implementation we need to also restore the the water and also the advancement of the ecosystem in this area so and and by by using eco hydrology approach we also blended with that's why we call it also transdisciplinary approach because we also implement or bring social elements that which is people to make sure the participation of various other elements which is culture and education and also law policy and governance because by by having these all elements in place then we can make sure or ensuring this sustainability by only if if only implementing one elements of natural resolution we cannot sustain this initiative so there is many others aspect that we need to take into consideration to make sure the sustainability so it is similarly like the case inputs that I mentioned and which I share with all of you this all element is took in into account this element of the yeah improving this there is they also use wetland for the for improving the water quality in this in the lake and it even though it is not really costal it is not costal ecosystem but they in inside Putrajaya they have also similar approach by having the wetland vegetation and when there is a flood for example there is all they also receiving the impact of flood which affected the ecosystem services there but it's shown that by implementing this by using this specific wetlands to this wetland can also functioning not only to absorb water pollution water not only to absorb pollutant but also function as a mitigation of the flood in this area in this wetland area so similar approach by if we use this wetlands in others costal area it can be functioning similarly but of course we need to study others environmental condition and to get this good benefit and yeah to to study also the quantification of this specific ecosystem that we need. Yeah thank you very much Dr. Afitree I totally agree with you to manage the water system ecosystem we should manage from the top of the hill until the sea where today topic we are not only focusing on the sustainable of the coastal and estuary developments but we are also looking at the natural base solutions and as well as the eco-hydrology aspect where that will be the best we can look out from the upstream of the rivers until the sea which is the downstream and we have one more questions from our participant here oh you see the professor after I answered the question offline but anyway we have a few questions in the list now yeah one of the questions is are natural based solutions also applicable in urban environments maybe and either of you can answer these questions. I'm ready to take that up from Yan. Strictly speaking of course nature-based solutions in an urban environment man-made environment is a bit of a contradiction then again as with coastal protection or estuarine development it's possible to have a pleasant living conditions or secure that in urban environment yet having the safety measures in place let me just mention some possibilities that are being used in the Netherlands or Hong Kong others that is making use of temporary storage for example parking garage or sub-parking garage reservoir underground that you don't notice but that can store excessive fluvial say disasters before being released onto the river or out to the sea or back for reuse again in Rotterdam for example there are some parks that look like parks they're very pleasant people can play during summer days but to in essence in case of extreme events it can serve as a temporary storage and there's no harm or not much harm in flooding parks on a Sunday afternoon if there's no people around then to having parts of the city inundated so so you can blend again you can blend these solutions with a natural environment and that's the challenge and that's being researched in many parts of the world. Yeah, yes definitely I think Professor Utter I agree with you and this is a good answer Elvie do you want to answer? Yes I can also answer as an additional input of this question from for this question as you seen also in my presentation there is a map of the equidology demonstration site in fact we have one of the category of the catchment implementation in the city or basin catchment and some of them are also urban areas and of course this when we implement equidology in the urban catchment it becomes the big scale of implementation it's not the small scale or pilot project and we have few of this urban demonstration site such as in in France itself urban periphery of Lyon and there is some urban and but the way we implement equidology because equidology implementation is always liars with the aquatic ecosystem so it means when it is urban area we will need to improve the aquatic ecosystem in this urban area and it will affect all the water quality within the urban catchment and also by having this improvement of this water in this urban area which also improve the ecosystem surfaces climate resilience in this urban area in fact that is one of our aim for the implementation of equidology but of course some countries or some areas they cannot work on the urban because they have only very small catchment area or pilot site demonstration site but selected demonstration site we have in the urban areas also yeah thank you thank you Dr. Rahman yes this is one of the good questions and also we have decent to both speaker on the answer and the major based solutions as well as the ecohydrologies very very important part to make sure that we can achieve in terms of the sustainable water management in terms for water quality as well and also to take care of biodiversity as was also highlighted by Dr. Fletcher just now in your your lectures and we have a once participant here just raised a hand maybe the secretary can you invite him we have engineer Lim Simpo he's from the global water consultant you will like to ask the questions here engineer Lim the floor the floor is yours can you unmute then you can speak yeah I just get to know from our secretary the participant are not allowed to speak but anyway I will read out the message for the questions from engineer Lim Simpo from global water consultant Malaysia and his question direct to Dr. Fletcher can you please brief briefing brief us about the main criteria to be an ecohydrological demo site in your opinion is Shanghai Qing Sha Sha is one of the good demo sites did we get the questions Dr. Fletcher yes yes okay yeah okay actually we I would like to invite all of you also to to go or to check in our ecohydrology web platform which we have list down there the minimum criteria to become a demonstration site and of course one of the criteria is have to be implement the ecohydrology principle and technologies because some demonstration site they don't do anything yet and they apply for demonstration site then we cannot accept because the main important elements they need to show or to implement the ecohydrology ecohydrology principle and technologies in this in their catchment then when they shown the specific impact or result of the implementation then only they can apply for demonstration site and then of course it's mostly project solution oriented it means to solve the specific issues like either to address water quality issues or to address sedimentation or all all aspects of water and environmental issues they need to highlight the issues and then what are the so the solution the nature best solution of which solution to implement the issues and also because we our approach is not only the scientific aspect but also the culture education and law policies so they need to show the multi-stakeholder involvement in this in their implementation need to show the local community participation and also most important also the sufficient funding because if they don't have funds it is difficult to sustain or to make sure the implementation will will be sustainable so this sum of element need to to have already in place so it means they need to strategize on how to get this all elements then only they can yeah but but it means whatever it is they need to show the implementation first not not planning to do if it is planning to do it means not yet not yet what suitable sorry not not yet what cannot cannot apply for equity demonstration site yet so they need to show showcase the the implementation first and but it is open for all to apply not only the government but all all the universities NGOs individual all researchers or experts on equity it's welcome to apply the most equity yeah thank you very much or dr rama i think i would suggest the participants to look into the UNESCO website find out the criteria to become the UNESCO demonstration site site and also due to the i think the time we have can only answer one more question but before that maybe we have two questions here uh is there any questions i think the speaker you want to answer live or one of these questions you can actually answer live yeah but i can see a professor Arthur is writing on the answer for Shahira which is one of the participants maybe look at every three you want to answer the first question what is the equal hydrology usually faces some challenges in building the long term effect on the ecological and hydrological changes in the rapidly changed climates leading to the uncertainty in applications how can we overcome all these issues yeah yes because um uh that that is also in my presentation because it is the natural best solution it's it will achieve the long time uh so um the long time um uh so i mean good good uh environmental condition for the long time uh long time because it is um um what call it it is it is low cost also because it's as compared to others uh technologies but because because it is um uh nature uh adaptable solution uh so it will be um long time evolutionary because um um how to say because it is uh it is um is this a natural so so it will be adaptable with the environmental condition so it will create the the long term ecosystem uh good ecosystem um um yeah as compared to others uh others um uh technologies or infrastructure that will that can be broken in one or two years maybe like many depends on the maintenance or so but when we use the nature uh best solution it will also long term sustainable solution um yeah because uh because we use ecosystem properties for the management so then the ecosystem will be sustained there that's great uh thank you very much dr rama fv3 i think i will keep uh all your questions here uh we are not going to answer other questions because we are limited time here and also we have a professor siva um uh which uh is chair of the our speciality book of the sustainable coastal and estuarine developments we were going to close our section for today but before that i will just like to invite all of you to come to our conference our international conference on iasya in this November uh in china where you will be learned more about what is eco hydrology as well as on the natural based solution for the sustainable coastal and estuarine developments and we're going to have our field trip uh to the chings house which have been mentioned by one of our experts just now is one of the good example of the demonstration site uh maybe units go can consider that as part of them yeah thank you uh i will pass back to uh professor siva uh thank you very much uh fangin and thank you um uh right at the start we did ask some poll questions uh so i would like to share that poll results with you actually uh i hope you all can see this uh so we did ask uh at the time it was about 88 participants 66 out of the 88 as participated so there's a quite a good response 75 percent mostly coming from asian continent and i can understand that north american american continents are sleeping at the time didn't obviously would not have suited them and most of you have come from uh academia and industry uh and there's a bit of mix i can see that governments NGOs etc so that's good to see that sort of mix perhaps we may have to have more government and planning authorities to participate in future in terms of experience it's good to see that quite a number of you over 50 percent actually have at least five or six experience years or more experience in this area which is very nice um but we didn't ask whether are you familiar with those three focal areas in our specialist group core cell reservoirs tidal basins and waterfront developments i think it looks to me that this order of 10 to 15 percent of the people are familiar with this uh uh and others are very much interested so i think that's something uh that we will take that on board in our future seminars and future development so so i'll stop at that point with that sharing um okay so i can i'm unable to advance the slides okay so we i like to quickly run down some of the upcoming uh i w a events webinars and events and the first one is this uh very unique i would say for i w a says first i w a non-sward sanitation conference and as you all know many cities and country towns and etc there are many non-sward areas so this would be very interesting uh this is going to happen on the 15th of october it's uh i'm assuming this is a webinar uh the next one is uh fangin has mentioned that i have also put this slide at the start it's it's our conference it's going to take place between 6th to the 9th of november uh in chiang shao city uh at near uh ho hi university's new campus uh and i hope some of you will be able to join us for this very important event and the next one is uh is further down in november uh there's an i w a digital water summit uh summit in uh bibao in spain so i think this is another very important event for uh i w a as we go through whole range of digital uh we live in digital environment i guess so so water uh digital water summit would be an exciting one to attend uh and then finally i would like to also talk about the water and development congress and exhibition it's in kigali in ruanda and that's uh in between 10 to the 14th of uh december 23 so we have nearly come to the end of our webinar i i want to thank again our world-renowned two speakers frozen other minute and dr rama elphi three i'd like to thank our moderator frozen fangin to you and also the i w a team who has been particularly with erin uh jordan and others who have really took some time to make sure that these type of events are running very smoothly and lastly certainly not the least that all the audience who have just stayed till the end of the session so thank you very much and we hope to see you all soon in our next webinar or in a conference and i will say in oh yeah so there is some more okay so this is joining uh network so for example you can become a member of our network by using this code and there's a special discount which is applicable to till 31st of december and finally thank you very much for all participants and attendees thank you