On November 21, 2023, the IRTCES Delegation visited the UNESCO Beijing Office for a discussion and exchange. Mr. Shahbaz Khan, Director of UNESCO Beijing Office and Director of Multisectoral Regional Office for East Asia, and Ms. Ai Suguira, Program Officer of Natural Sciences Division, attended the meeting. Prof. Zhang Jianli, Deputy Director of the IRTCES, and relevant persons in charge of the Divisions of Secretariat, Research and Training, and International Exchange and Information of the IRTCES, and the Department of International Cooperation of the IWHR attended the meeting.

Prof. Zhang thanked UNESCO for its strong support and assistance to both IWHR and IRTCES. He introduced the achievements of the IRTCES and the progress of the preparation of the 40th anniversary series of activities. In recent years, focusing on the development strategy of UNESCO, it has undertaken a large number of consulting and service pro-jects in the fields of soil erosion and sediment management, hosted academic conferences and trainings, and promoted the distribution of academic journals, data collection and dissemination, popularization of science as well as capacity building, etc., so as to closely cooperate with UNESCO.

Director Shahbaz Khan congratulated the achievements of IWHR and IRTCES in water-related international cooperation, made suggestions on the positioning and development of IRTCES, expressed his full support for the preparatory work related to the 40th anniversary series of activities, and looked forward to IWHR and IRTCES to play a leading role in the development of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme (IHP).

Ms. Ai Sugiura introduced the overall operation of UNESCO category II water-related centers, congratulated IRTCES on its fruitful achievements, and hoped that communication and cooperation would be further strengthened under the framework of UNESCO's medium- and long-term strategic priorities.

Prof. Liu Cheng introduced previous achievements such as the case studies, education and capacity building carried out by the International Sediment Initiative (ISI), one of the IHP Flagship Initiatives, as well as the latest progress of updating the ISI objectives and strategy for the IHP IX, and further steps of the implementation planning, and governance structure in aligning with the new Flagship Initiative framework.

Prof. Du Pengfei introduced the progress and next step plan of the global soil erosion and river sediment data collection from the perspectives, data source, data processing and data display.

Dr. Meng Yuan introduced the cooperation of IWHR with UNESCO in the field of youth water science education. Taking the multilingual publication of Water Knowledge Reader as an opportunity, a series of activities have been carried out to bring high-quality water science popularization education resources to more than 50 teachers and 200 primary school students in Kenya, Cambodia and other countries.

Both sides had in-depth exchanges on the strategic position of IHP Phase IX, the role played by ISI, open science and open data, data collection and publication channels, water science education outreach and preparation for the series of activities for the IRTCES 40th anniversary.