FOREWORDS FROM CHAIRMAN OF THE LOCAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Dear Readers,

It is our pleasure to present you with the proceedings of the 22nd Congress of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research-Asia Pacific Division (IAHR-APD) organized by Hokkaido University during September 14 to 17, 2020.

IAHR-APD originally was set to take place in Sapporo, Japan but due to the global outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, the local organizing committee decided to turn the conference into a virtual conference setting. We are really sorry that we could not have the usual meeting but we worked hard to make this virtual conference as fruitful and enjoyable as always.

The Congress brought up the theme “Creating resilience to water-related challenges”. This phrase was adopted as the main theme of the Congress to maintain awareness of climate change and water-related disasters induced by extreme weather.

As every year, the Congress has encouraged meaningful interactions among researchers, industries, and communities, on the dissemination of water-related research achievements and ideas that paves the way for sustainable water and environment-related development.

The local organizing committee would like to express our great appreciation to all the staff of the IAHR and IAHR-APD for their endless and excellent support to the congress.

We would like to thank all of the sponsors and participants for their valuable contributions to make this Congress successful and meaningful. We are very grateful to the reviewers of the papers and the editors of the proceedings for all the efforts for providing high-quality and timely review, despite the challenging times of the COVID-19 crisis. Finally, we would like to thank to all the healthcare workers around the world who are working tirelessly to contain this pandemic.

It is our hope that this proceedings will furnish the readers with excellent references and stimulate further studies and researches in the related areas.

Yours sincerely,

Yasuyuki Shimizu

23rd IAHR-APD 2020 Congress Chair