• UNESCO.org/
• Natural Sciences/
• Freshwater/
• IHP/
• Cross-cutting programmes/
• FRIEND/

• Themes
• Global changes and water resources
• Integrated watershed and aquifer dynamics
• Land-habitat hydrology
• Water and society
• Water education and training
•  

• Worldwide
• 
  
• Africa
• Arab States
• Asia and the Pacific
• Europe and North America
• Latin America and the Caribbean
•  

History of the FRIEND inititive

FRIEND is a cross-cutting programme that interacts with all five core IHP-VI themes in its objective of easing the problems of water resources assessment and management through applied research targeted at regionally identified problems.

The origin of FRIEND goes back to the International Hydrological Decade (IHD), which launched a large number of representative and experimental basins, underpinned mostly by national financial support. In retrospect, the IHD was a highly visionary programme, which now provides the longer-term data sets for assessing the hydrological impacts of climatic variability and land-use change. At the time the IHD was launched, neither climate change nor global change were commonly part of the scientific vocabulary.

With the launch of FRIEND as a contribution to UNESCO's Third International Hydrological Programme (IHP-III) from 1984-1988, the initial focus was on the data-rich basins of northwest Europe (EURO FRIEND). Various techniques were established, ranging from statistical methods to conceptual and physical models, for assessing the regional hydrological behaviour of flow regimes.

In its second phase (1989-1993), FRIEND expanded geographically and became established in the Alpine and Mediterranean (MED) region, and later in Western and Central Africa and in Southern Africa. FRIEND scientific groups had made a unique contribution by their impact on the policy of national governments towards the international exchange of hydrological data.

During the third and fourth phases (1994-1997 and 1998-2001), FRIEND made a major contribution to IHP-V (1996-2001) and progressively diffused into other regions. Asian Pacific FRIEND, Nile FRIEND, Hindu Kush/Himalayan (HKH) FRIEND and FRIEND/AMIGO for Latin America and the Caribbean were all established at this time, and today over 100 countries participate in FRIEND within the eight regional FRIEND groups.

Further expansion is expected, with the possibility of establishing FRIEND in Mesopotamia, Central Asia and the Andes.

Contact

Global FRIEND Coordinator:
Mr Trevor Daniell: trevord@civeng.adelaide.edu.au

UNESCO FRIEND Coordinator:
Mr Siegfried Demuth: s.demuth@unesco.org