13th World Lake Conference

The World Lake Conference is a series of academic conferences first initiated by International Lake Environment Committee (ILEC) in 1984. The following countries have hosted the World Lake Conference since the first WLC in Japan: United States, Hungary, China, Italy, Argentina, Denmark, Kenya and India, contributing significantly to international cooperation and exchange on global lake environment protection.

China won the right to host the 13th World Lake Conference with support from the Ministry of Environmental Protection and under the joint partnership of Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences and Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences. The motivation for hosting this conference is to promote national efforts targeted at the protection of lake environments, expand scientific and technological research in this field, and to uplift China as an influential global player on environmental protection.

The 13th World Lake Conference will take place from the November 1 to November 5, 2009, in Wuhan (Hubei, China), organized with the collaboration of the International Lake Environment Committee (ILEC), Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences (CSES), Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences (CRAES) and Wuhan Municipality.

Conference president: Minister Zhou Shengxian

Conference theme: “Lake Ecosystem Restoration: Global Challenges and the Chinese Initiative”.

The rapid economic and social development of China has left the 24,800 natural lakes in severely damaged condition. The issue of eutrophication is increasingly prominent, particularly in Taihu, Dianchi and Chaohu Lake. The Chinese government attaches great importance to the lake environment protection and adopts a series of measures to improve lake environments in China. In 2007, the Chinese Government put forth the strategy of “recovering the rivers, lakes, and seas under extreme stress” and carried out a major technological project for the “control and management of water contamination”, investing heavily in technological measures to rectify the issue of water and lake environment contamination.