LAUSR

In these times of human, economic and political change as well as that related to natural environment and climate change, research has become more relevant. A January 2018 publication of the American Meteorological Society (Herring et al. 2018) that aimed to explain the extreme events of 2016 concluded that most of them would not have been possible without human-caused climate change. In Asia, the most important events were record high temperatures, record low temperatures, and extreme rainfalls. Record heat was unusually widespread in South-East Asia, southern India and northern Eurasia, causing human casualties. In Thailand, it also caused crop devastation and extremely high energy use. The extreme rainfall in June and July in the Yangtze-Huai region, especially in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River basin, caused severe flooding, waterlogging and landslides, with losses estimated at USD 10 billion. Qian et al. (2018) reported that in January record-breaking cold events affected most areas of China, especially the eastern regions, and that 1.18 billion people lived in the areas where daily mean temperatures fell by more than 6 °C. The IPCC (2018) special report on global warming of 1.5 °C states that human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0 °C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, with a likely range of 0.8 °C to 1.2 °C; that this warming will persist for centuries or millennia and continue to cause further long-term changes in climate systems; and that climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth are projected to increase (p. SPM.10). These findings force the world to take longer-term perspectives that respond to the enormous challenge facing humanity, that are less political, and that are followed with actions that respond to the ‘new’ climate. In the face of far-reaching change, one of the countries that are implementing numerous measures aiming at improving environmental quality is China. Regarding water resources, management, governance and infrastructure, actions have been taken and continue to be implemented all over the country. One of them is the River Chief System. This is a horizontal and vertical system that makes party members and government leaders responsible for control of pollution and ecological restoration of rivers and lakes. They have the authority to coordinate activities among departments and regions. They also supervise river chiefs at lower levels, from provincial to municipal, country and township levels. First implemented in Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province, in 2007, it has been extended all over the country. Its incentive structure has made it effective: the performance of officials as River Chief System officials affects their overall performance, which means they can be either promoted or suspended on this basis (Dai, 2015). In this regard, in this first issue of 2019, our articles emphasize the importance of investigating aspects that have proven to improve water resources management in practice. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WATER RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT 2019, VOL. 35, NO. 1, 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2019.1545369