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.

Population growth, increasing living standards, and rapidly changing climate have resulted in an increasing demand for freshwater, accelerating the water degradation challenges. There is a compelling need to minimize water consumption and develop approaches to effectively manage existing water resources. On a positive note, water resource management strategies discussed in this book present innovative ways to conserve both quality and quantity. Chapter 1 discusses decentralized water management approaches for intervening the urban water cycle to minimize the environmental and socioeconomic impacts. This chapter concludes with a need to use a suite of tools based on decision support systems for managing urban water resources. Chapter 2 discusses the need for assessing suitability of various types of models for a specific scenario based on the required level of complexity. This chapter discusses in detail the underlying criteria behind model selection, validation, and uncertainty analysis. Urban watersheds can be more challenging compared to natural watersheds. The urban watersheds include parking lots, roads, and developed structures, all of which contribute to a myriad of anthropogenic pollutants through stormwater runoff. Computer-based models can be used to study water quality issues and to develop a plan to manage watershed level resources. Chapter 3 compares pros and cons of the state-of-the-art watershed models used for managing water resources. Numerical simulations can be performed to compare the current and future water quality scenarios of a given watershed and to estimate the impact of potential water resource management strategies. Chapter 4 presents a case study of an urban region in Hanoi, Vietnam. Water evaluation and planning simulation tool was used to predict the trends and drivers of wastewater generation. Considering rapidly changing climate and associated weather impacts, it is critical to secure water resources in addition to dealing with the water quality issues. Chapter 5 suggests that climate change models and watershed and precipitation models should be jointly used in order to capture uncertainties in ecological functions, energy and food production and water supply sources. Chapter 6 presents a water use estimation and management tool that examines the effect of climate change and drought conditions on water supplies to ensure adequate buffalo forage. Sustaining both buffalo forage and water supplies during drought conditions requires preparedness and adaptation in response to unfavorable conditions. Finally, water reuse can alleviate the stress on available water resources. For example, effluents from wastewater treatment plants and desalination plants can be treated and reused for managing water crisis. Chapter 7 emphasizes that it is critical to optimize both economical and sustainability parameters during treatment of wastewater effluents and desalination concentrate. In certain cases, valuable metals can be recovered from the concentrate.