Dachang Zhang

Title : Suitaiology- A new water science to meet the challenges of climate change and agricultural sustainable development

Abstract:

Extreme climate change with increasing frequency and magnitude has globally caused great damage and loss through extreme droughts, floods and other secondary disasters during the past years. The most affected are agriculture and ecology. Floods and secondary disasters such as soil loss, mudslides, and landslides often cause losses to farmland, houses, and life. Extreme droughts cause water shortages for humans and livestock, crop failure, forests withered, and desertification. Facing disasters, traditional measures for flood or drought often fail. Traditional water science regards the surface and underground water produced by precipitation as the total amount of water resources. However, in the current situation, floods are actually just the source of disasters rather than water resources. In the extreme drought period, the so-called "water resources" has lost its meaning. Obviously, the traditional concept of water resources is very flawed and cannot effectively guide water management. In order to meet the challenges of climate change and sustainable agricultural development, we have proposed Suitaiology (from Chinese and Japanese: ??/?? (shuitai/suitai), "water dynamic status"; and from Greek: λ?γος, logos, "study of") as a new branch of water science to redefine water resources and guide the optimization of water management accordingly. Suitaiology reveals that water resources are different from other resources from a dynamic point of view. Only the used part can become a resource, and the unused part will be lost and cannot become a resource. Therefore, water resources have the characteristics of being created.

Suitaiology focuses on how to lead water as a resource and conform to the system situation of economic, social and ecological carrying capacity and sustainable development as the core, regards water management and its service objects, environment and conditions as a dynamic system that restricts and promotes each other, studies the natural situation of water, the impact of human intervention on the water situation, the negative and positive situation transformation relationship between the disasters nature and resources nature of water, and the relationship among water situation changes and economic, social and ecological systems, takes sustainable development as its basic ideological principles, and applies the concepts, knowledge and research methods from systems theory, cybernetics, information theory, operations research, and circular economy to research, and guides the integration and optimization of the existing flood control systems, drought control systems, and irrigation
systems to a new type of low-cost, low-energy consumption, low-carbon footprint, easyto-build and -handle water management system with significant comprehensive benefits.

Biography:

Dr. Dachang Zhang received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in hydrogeology & Engineering Geology from the Changchun Institute of Geology and Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1982 and 1985 respectively, then became a researcher at Chinese Academy of Sciences. After his PhD degree in geography from the University of Vienna in 1996 with significant contributions to a national water project of Austria, he was a postdoctoral fellowship and researcher at the University of Waterloo, Canada from 1997-2000. And then, he worked as a consultant in Canada and U.S.A. and become a License Professional Geologist of the State of California since 2007. He also worked for the University of Bijie, China, as a Professor and the Deputy Dean of the Academy for Bijie Experimental Region for water management and rural development in impoverished mountainous areas from 2008 to 2014. He is the Founder and President of the Water &Eco Crisis Foundation, USA, since 2010. In 2012, Dr. Dachang Zhang and his team set out to create a new water science—Suitaiology, which was first officially released at the 1st Edition of Global Conference on Agriculture and Horticulture (AGRI 2021) in 2021.