Sustainability Criteria For Water Resource Systems

An international group of experts review guidelines for achieving sustainability in water resource systems.

This committee report, Sustainability Criteria for Water Resource Systems, addresses the need and challenge to reexamine our approaches to water resources planning and management. Water resource systems need to be able to satisfy the changing demands placed on them, now and on into the future, without system degradation. In order to create these sustainable systems, a more holistic and integrated life-cycle approach to water resources planning, development, and management must take place. Such an approach should lead to plans, facilities, and policies that will be physically, economically, environmentally, ecologically, and socially acceptable and beneficial by current as well as future generations. This document examines many of the major issues and challenges raised by the concept of sustainability applied to water resource system design and management. Various suggested guidelines are reviewed including the extent to which they have been applied in the development and management of water resource systems. Some approaches for measuring and modeling sustainability are outlined, and ways are illustrated in which these measures and models might be used when evaluating designs and operating policies. While this manual focuses on the contributions scientists, engineers, economists, and planners can make, it recognizes that the public stakeholders and their political representatives and institutions must also contribute to efficient and sustainable water management.

This committee report, Sustainability Criteria for Water Resource Systems, addresses the need and challenge to reexamine our approaches to water resources planning and management. Water resource systems need to be able to satisfy the changing demands placed on them, now and on into the future, without system degradation. In order to create these sustainable systems, a more holistic and integrated life-cycle approach to water resources planning, development, and management must take place. Such an approach should lead to plans, facilities, and policies that will be physically, economically, environmentally, ecologically, and socially acceptable and beneficial by current as well as future generations. This document examines many of the major issues and challenges raised by the concept of sustainability applied to water resource system design and management. Various suggested guidelines are reviewed including the extent to which they have been applied in the development and management of water resource systems. ways are illustrated in which these measures and models might be used when evaluating designs and operating policies. While this manual focuses on the contributions scientists, engineers, economists, and planners can make, it recognizes that the public stakeholders and their political representatives and institutions must also contribute to efficient and sustainable water management.

Water resources professionals have an obligation to conceive and manage water resource systems so that they will fully contribute to an improved quality of life. Those sustainable water resource systems will be able to satisfy the changing demands that will inevitably be placed on them, without significant system degradation. An international group of experts has reviewed various guidelines for achieving greater degrees of sustainability and the extent to which they have been applied in a number of case studies. The group provides approaches for measuring and modeling sustainability and ways in which these measures and models might be used when evaluating alternative designs and operating policies are illustrated.

Ensuring safe and plentiful supplies of potable water (both now and for future generations) and developing sustainable treatment processes for wastewater are among the world’s greatest engineering challenges. However, sustainability requires investment of money, time and knowledge. Some parts of the world are already working towards this goal but many nations have neither the political will nor the resources to tackle even basic provision and sanitation. Combining theory and practice from the developing and developed worlds with high- and low-tech, high- and low-cost solutions, this book discusses fundamental and advanced aspects of water engineering and includes: water resource issues including climate change, water scarcity, economic and financial aspects requirements for sustainable water systems fundamentals of treatment and process design industrial water use and wastewater treatment sustainable effluent disposal sustainable construction principles With integrated theory, design and operation specifications for each treatment process, this book addresses the extent to which various treatment methods work in theory as well as how cost effective they are in practice. It provides a nontechnical guide on how to recover and reuse water from effluent, which is suitable for those in water resource management, environmental planning, civil and chemical engineering.

During the past five decades, we have witnessed a tremendous evolution in water resource system management. Three characteristics of this evolution are of particular note: First, the application of the systems approach to complex water management problems has been established as one of the most important advances in the field of water resource management. Second, the past five decades have brought a remarkable transformation of attitude in the water resource management community towards environmental concerns and action to address these concerns. Third, applying the principles of sustainability to water resource decision-making requires major changes in the objectives on which decisions are based, and an understanding of the complicated inter-relationships between existing ecological, economic, and social factors. The Special Issue includes 15 contributions that offer insights into contemporary problems, approaches, and issues related to the management of complex water resources systems. It will be presumptuous to say that these 15 contributions characterize the success or failure of the systems approach to support water resources decision-making. However, these contributions offer interesting lessons from current experiences and highlight possible future work.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This revised, updated textbook presents a systems approach to the planning, management, and operation of water resources infrastructure in the environment. Previously published in 2005 by UNESCO and Deltares (Delft Hydraulics at the time), this new edition, written again with contributions from Jery R. Stedinger, Jozef P. M. Dijkman, and Monique T. Villars, is aimed equally at students and professionals. It introduces readers to the concept of viewing issues involving water resources as a system of multiple interacting components and scales. It offers guidelines for initiating and carrying out water resource system planning and management projects. It introduces alternative optimization, simulation, and statistical methods useful for project identification, design, siting, operation and evaluation and for studying post-planning issues. The authors cover both basin-wide and urban water issues and present ways of identifying and evaluating alternatives for addressing multiple-purpose and multi-objective water quantity and quality management challenges. Reinforced with cases studies, exercises, and media supplements throughout, the text is ideal for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in water resource planning and management as well as for practicing planners and engineers in the field.