Dear Rector magnificus, honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great honour for me and professor Savenije to act as honorary promotors of Prof. Murugesu Sivapalan who is one of the most eminent, if not the most eminent, hydrologists of our time. You have just witnessed a short video that presented the highlights of Prof. Sivapalans achievements, but clearly, such a video is too short to present the full breadth and impact of Professor Sivapalans work. Professor Sivapalan, or Siva as everybody calls him, started out as an engineer. He received his engineering degree from the University of Ceylon and his Masters degree in Water Resources Engineering from AIT in Bangkok. He then started to work as a civil engineer at an international consultancy in Nigeria for a few years. This gave him the solid engineering foundation for his scientific work for which we now honour him today. Later, Siva did his PhD degree in Hydrology at Princeton University, where he laid the foundation for the work in which he would become world famous: the issues of scale in hydrology. In a series of papers on scale issues and hydrologic similarity, he conceptualised the nature of hydrological heterogeneity and scale and their effect on runoff response. Even to this very day, the problems of scale (or the question why hydrological processes behave differently or dominate at different scales) are heavily debated in hydrology. Prof Sivapalan is a world leader in this debate, who all the time is able to reformulate and redefine this problem and identify new avenues for research to address this all-important subject. Building on this work, around mid 90ies, Professor Sivapalan introduced the concept of watershed thermodynamics, which led to a completely new modelling paradigm called Representative Elementary Watersheds (REW), for the development of which he closely cooperated with our university, in particular during his sabbatical stay in Delft in ???.

Seeing that, thanks to the ever-increasing computational capacity of modern computers, there was a dominant trend in hydrology towards more complex and more data-intensive models, he was one of the first to realise that this approach potentially was leading hydrologists further and further away from the observable physical processes. He then introduced the so-called downward approach to hydrology where we take a closer look at what the data tell us and move away from the mere hydrograph fitting with overly complex models, towards increasing our understanding by stepwise introducing more complexity as more information becomes available. This new approach is now bearing fruit and has received many followers worldwide. But, it was thanks to Prof. Sivapalans vision and leadership that this new thinking gained momentum. It was during this time, about 12 years ago, that Prof Sivapalan began to feel the urge to make a fundamental contribution to the water problems that the world is facing. As we all know, making a contribution to science is one thing, but making a contribution to solving global problems is another. He realised that hydrological scientists were rather poor at predicting hydrological behaviour in places or in situations where they had not yet had the opportunity to make observations: a problem that in particular many developing countries are facing. In a global consultative process this theme of ' Prediction in Ungauged Basins' was seleceted as the leading science theme for the International Association of Hydrological Sciences. Interesting to note that this was triggered by an email Prof. Sivapalan send in 2001 while in Delft during one of his visits. He even recalls that it was on a sunny afternoon! Consequently, he was chairing the Science Steering Committee in the early years, developed a science plan for Prediction in Ungauged Basins, and consequently provided a lot of leadership to the hydrological community and beyond. This PUB programme has a lot of impact on hydrological sciences and let to more integrated approach. Noteworthy, it became the leading agenda of the IAHS for the decade 2002-2012. This year in October, well witness the closure of this decade with, I am proud to say, a major conference in Delft.

Being a world leader in ones profession is not something that stops after the completion of a major success story. Prof. Sivapalan is never satisfied with his accomplishments and is always looking ahead. He is now the main initiator and driving force behind the definition of another global research agenda, which he termed Prediction under Change. It deals with the science of a changing environment, whereby the bio-physical world is no longer considered static, but subject to interacting processes that involve ecosystems and human influenced land-use systems. His vision is that we can only understand the future if we understand the co-evolution of physical, biotic and societal processes. In a recent publication he coined this new science as socio-hydrology. The mere definition of this new science is a major undertaking and achievement. Ladies and gentlemen. In this short laudation I shall not be able to explain the full breadth of Prof. Sivapalans accomplishments. It is undoable. Professor Sivapalan has received all the major honours and awards that exist in hydrological sciences: the International Hydrology Prize of IAHS, the Horton medal of AGU and the Dalton medal of EGU, and many many others. I would like to conclude that, on behalf of the co-promotor professor Savenije, I feel very proud and honoured to propose Prof. Murugesu Sivapalan for the honorary doctorate of Delft University of Technology.