The 16^th General Conference of the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) for the advancement of science in developing countries was recently held in Hangzhou, China.

Junguo LIU, Chair Professor of the School of Environmental Science and Engineering (ESE) and member of the European Academy of Sciences, received the 2022 TWAS Award in Social Sciences for his contribution to policy-relevant studies on water resources, climate change mitigation, and environmental management in China and other countries.

Prof. Junguo LIU, a recipient of the Outstanding Young Scientist from the National Science Foundation of China, is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Geographical Society, UK, and the Royal Meteorological Society.

He has long been engaged in scientific research and teaching on water resources and ecological restoration. In the protection and utilization of water resources, he proposed the three-dimensional water shortage theory and the ecological restoration theory.

Prof. LIU has published more than 200 papers in domestic and international journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications, Nature Sustainability, and Science Advances.

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. He is also the first President of SERB, and the first Chair of USEREP.

He also serves as the main author of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Vice Chairman of the China National Committee of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), and a member of the Standing Committee of the Beijing Association for Science and Technology (BAST).

This year, there were a total of 13 recipients of the TWAS Award. It is presented to individual scientists each year in recognition of their outstanding contribution to scientific knowledge in the nine fields of Agricultural Sciences, Biology, Chemistry, Earth, Astronomy and Space Sciences, Engineering Sciences, Mathematics, Medical Sciences, Physics, and Social Sciences.

Founded in 1983 under the leadership of Abdus Salam, the Pakistani physicist and Nobel laureate, TWAS believes that developing nations, by building strength in science and engineering, could build the knowledge and skill to address such challenges as hunger, disease, and poverty. They support exchanges and cooperation between researchers and scientific research institutions, and promote the development of basic science and applied science.