Junguo Liu

Prof. Junguo Liu is a Senior Guest Research Scholar with the IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program, Center for Landscape Resilience & Management (ESM-CLR). His main research interests include hydrology and water resources management, global environmental change, and ecological restoration. He has earned an excellent international reputation through his contributions to the fields of water resources research and ecological restoration. His scientific achievements and extensive services to the hydrological communities worldwide are outstanding and he has led pioneering work on advancing water resources assessment in coupled human-natural systems, in particular for global hydrology research and water scarcity assessment by incorporating water resources quantity, quality and environmental flow requirement. His work has been a breakthrough in assessing and quantifying the water quantity and quality related water scarcity, which has become increasingly common in many areas in the world as the poor water quality makes the limited water resources not useable. He has extensive working experience in China, Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S., among others. He is an expert consultant for many international organizations including UN-Water, UNEP, and the Water Footprint Network. He was selected as a Lead Author of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Sixth Assessment Report. He is a target leader of the Decade Program 2013-2022 (Panta Rhei) of the International Association for Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), the Chair of the working group on Water Scarcity Assessment of the Panta Rhei program, and the vice-president of the Chinese Working Committee for the IAHS-Panta Rhei. He organized and co-chaired the first International Conference on Hydrological Knowledge Innovation and Practice in Developing Countries in 2016 in Shenzhen, China. This conference has led to the mile-stone document 'The Shenzhen Declaration on Global Hydrological Science and Practice'.

Prof. Liu has made a substantial contribution to eco-hydrological restoration in China. He founded two ecological restoration organizations in China: the Society for Ecological Rehabilitation of Beijing (SERB), founded in 2014, and the Union of Societies for Ecological Restoration and Environmental Protection (USEREP), founded in 2016. The former is the first society recognized by the Chinese government which specifically focuses on eco-hydrological restoration. The latter is the first officially recognized union of Chinese organizations by Beijing Association of Science and Technology. Prof. Liu is the first president of SERB, and the first Chair of USEREP. Both the organizations are playing important roles in safeguarding China's water and ecological security. He was also the Chair of the 9th World Ecosystem Services Partnership Conference that was held in Shenzhen in December, 2017.

Prof. Liu is author of about 150 publications, including articles in Science (1), Nature (1), PNAS (2), Nature Climate Change (1), Nature Communications (1), Nature Sustainability (1) and Science Advances (1). His articles have been cited for about 5000 times. In recognition of his outstanding work, he won the Outstanding Young Scientist Award of the European Geosciences Union in 2009, and he was the first hydrologist in the world to receive this award. He also received The Person of the Year of Scientific Chinese (2011), ProSPER.Net-Scopus Young Scientist Award (2011), the Young Researcher Gold Award by China Science Daily (2012), the Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the National Natural Science Foundation in China (2016), the 2017 Communication Award of the International Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), the Young Scientists Award (one out of eight in all fields in China) from the Ministry of Education of China (2018), the Science and Technology Award for Chinese Youth (2019).


Last update: 14 JAN 2020