Prince Khaled Bin Sultan, chairman of the Trustees Council of the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Foundation and chairman of the Board of Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW), stressed the importance of water security in remarks here. He said it has become an inseparable part of national security and an important element of its strength. Hence, it should be given due importance by both the public and private sectors. This statement came during the distribution of the 7th Award for the PSIPW at a ceremony held at the UN headquarters in New York, which was attended by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, among other dignitaries. Prince Khaled warned that terrorism might change its strategy to target water resources. He appealed to all experts and those concerned to attach great importance to "biological water terrorism". The prizes for the 7th annual award were distributed to the winners of the SR1 million creativity prize and four specialist prizes for creativity in different fields of water. The creativity prize was shared by two winning teams. First was the team of Dr. Rita Colwell (University of Maryland at College Park) and Dr. Shafiqul Islam (Tufts University). The prize was awarded to the duo for developing and testing a model that uses chlorophyll information from satellite data to predict cholera outbreaks at least three to six months in advance. The second co-winner was Dr. Peter J. Webster (Georgia Institute of Technology) who won for his work on ocean-atmosphere interactions and their effect on monsoon strength, which is used to provide one to two-week lead time forecasts of monsoonal floods. The Surface Water Prize went to Dr. Gary Parker (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), one of the world's premier river geomorphologists, for work that clarifies the vexing problem of meandering rivers. The Groundwater Prize went to Dr. Tissa H. Illangasekare (Colorado School of Mines) for his work to improve the fundamental understanding of fluid flow and chemical transport in porous media through innovative multi-scale experimentation and modeling. The Alternative Water Resources Prize went to the team of Dr. Rong Wang & Dr. Anthony G. Fane (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) for the development and application of novel forward osmosis hollow fiber membranes. The Water Management and Protection Prize went to Dr. Daniel P. Loucks — (Cornell University) for the development and implementation of systems tools for practical water resources management problems worldwide.
