講者簡介:
Professor John Milliman, author of over 200 scientific journal publications and (author/editor) of 10 books, has studied a lot of rivers during his nearly 50-year research career. Prof. Milliman—who has compiled the world's largest river database with records from 1,534 rivers around the globe—recently focuses on the confluence of a growing human population, increased water use, and decreased river flow. He sees the pattern worldwide. During the last half of the 20th century, cumulative annual discharge from 137 representative rivers (watershed areas ranging from 0.3 to 6300 × 103 km2) to the global ocean remained constant, although annual discharge from about one-third of these rivers changed by more than 30%. Cumulative discharge from many mid-latitude rivers, in contrast, decreased by 60%. He cites examples from around the world—particularly China, the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and North America—where dam-building, groundwater withdrawal, "inter-basin transfer," desalinization, and other supply-side approaches to water management have provided short-term solutions but with long-term social, economic, and environmental costs.
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