Qiuhua Liang, professor of water engineering at Loughborough University in the UK and fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, represented PSIPW as its party-level delegate to the 30th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 30), which took place from 10 to 21 November 2025 in Belém, Brazil.
The COP30 summit brought parties together to discuss how governments can take action on climate change. A particular focus of COP 30 was the practical implementation of climate action and nature-based solutions, with a distinct regional emphasis on ecosystems and vulnerable communities.
Professor Liang, who also holds the UNESCO Chair in Informatics and Multi-hazard Risk Reduction, spoke on “Innovating for Flood Resilience in a Changing World: The Role of High-Performance Modelling and Intelligent Informatics”.
He presented at the panel on Innovating for Climate Action: Unlocking Technological Solutions for a Sustainable Future, which was officiated by Fernanda Delgado, Councilwoman of the Economic, Social and Sustainable Development Council of the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil.
Apart from participating in the panel discussion, Professor Liang highlighted disaster risk reduction as a global challenge increasingly intensified by the uncertainties of climate change. He emphasised the need for more integrated, science-based, and proactive approaches, harnessing emerging technologies to make risk-reduction efforts more effective. Professor Liang also outlined how climate change is reshaping water resources worldwide — altering hydrological extremes, increasing flood and drought risks, and placing growing pressure on water security and sustainable development.
PSIPW has sent a party-level delegate to COP since 2016. Over the course of that time, PSIPW delegates have advised COP on a wide range of topics. These include: [1] the impact of climate change on groundwater management, [2] effective rain and floodwater harvesting and storage under the uncertainties of climate change, [3] unlocking private capital in efforts to ameliorate the effects of climate change on water resources, [4] harnessing Earth observation for food and water security, and [5] addressing the challenge of drought under climate change in water scarce and data scarce regions, [6] the impact of nature-based solutions for climate change mitigation on global water resources, and [7] technological solutions to climate change and their limits from a hydrological perspective.
Like most PSIPW delegates to COP, Qiuhua Liang is a PSIPW laureate. For its 11th Award in 2024, Liang won PSIPW’s Surface Water Prize for developing the High-Performance Integrated Modelling System (HiPIMS), a pioneering multi-GPU hydrodynamic model that simulates and forecasts in real time the processes of rainfall-runoff, overland flow, river hydraulics and flood wave propagation across a large catchment or a city at a high temporal-spatial resolution.