On the occasion of the International Year of Mountains-2002, FAO and its partners undertook a large-scale assessment and global review of the current status and future trends of integrated and participatory watershed management. The overall objectives were to promote the exchange and dissemination of experiences in implementing watershed management projects in the decade from 1990 to 2000 and to identify the vision for a new generation of watershed management programmes and projects. This resource book represents a summary and critical analysis of the rich discussions and vast materials that emerged during the review, as well as the review's findings and recommendations. It presents the state of the art in watershed management, promotes further reflection and creative thinking and proposes new ideas and approaches for future watershed management programmes and projects. This publication has been written primarily for field-level watershed management practitioners and local decision-makers involved in watershed management at the district or municipality level. It will also be a useful source of information for other readers such as senior officers and consultants specialized in other areas, evaluators, policy-makers and students of watershed management

A five-country river basin study in Asia used a participatory method for diagnostic investigations to learn about contextual processes, as well as for stakeholder consultation to develop action plans. The use of this methodology was encouraged by the positive results of an earlier action research program conducted in Pakistan for mobilizing farmers to form their own organizations. The method was found to be exceptionally effective, and had many advantages over the conventional methodsof field research and action planning where the stakeholders are treated as objects of research and passive recipients of development messages. The contribution of participatory learning and action in developing institutions appeared to vary across the five selected river basins, depending on thedegree to which stakeholder participation was forthcoming. This variation could be attributed to study constraints in terms of time and other resources, which acted differently on the five study teams. In some cases, conducting full-fledged participatory methods was not possible due to sociopolitical constraints, and in some others, time was too short to build sufficient awareness among the large number of stakeholders for meaningful participation. Of the five river basin case studies in China, Indonesia, Nepal, Philippines and Sri Lanka, satisfactory participation levels achieved in the cases of Sri Lanka, Philippines and Indonesia generated a momentum on their own, which helped them to initiate action plans for further institutional development.

Efforts have long been made in India to improve the management of major watersheds for ecological reasons - such as reducing the siltation of reservoirs. The management of micro-watersheds (of around 500 hectares) is a more recent focus of policy and has both ecology and livelihoods as itsobjectives. Experiments have shown that, in some areas, more than a doubling of resource productivity can be achieved by careful rehablitation. Many watersheds contain both private and common land. It is already clear from a number a efforts led by NGOs that, to be equitable and institutionally sustainable, the rehabilitation of both common and private lands needs action rooted in strong resource user-groups capable of taking decisions ina participatory way and resolving conflict. To build up groups in this way requires both time and skills, both of which have proved elusive in government projects and programmes. The key question addressed in this book is how far the approaches developed by NGOs can be adopted (or adapted) by the public sector and applied on a wide scale,for, without such approaches, neither the ecological nor the livelihood benefits of watershed rehabilitation will be achieved.

Survival on earth is impossible without water and hence, water is indispensable for one and all. All forms of life depend on water for sustenance. Availability of water is a challenging quotient for the existence of life on our planet. Fiction writers even predict a world war in the distant future just for water! Unless adequate measures are taken to conserve the available water resources, the supply of this may be at a risk and soon may get exhausted. Scientists say that overexploitation of water would impoverish underground water resources and that the world might in the future turn out to be become a desert soon. In India, the stress on the availability of water is increasing day by day primarily due to population explosion and the raise in the standards of living.

Focusing on the technical, social, and economic issues involved in watershed management, this interdisciplinary author team focuses on bettering land use practices and the condition of soil water resources. Integrated Watershed Management in the Global Ecosystem is a volume composed from an international symposium of the world's leading experts

Papers presented at the National Workshop on Community Participation in Watershed Management held at Chandigarh.

This book presents a case study on a semi-arid region, Maharashtra State, India, and discusses problems concerning a broad range of areas: sustainable watershed development; watershed management; groundwater condition; land and resource development plans; thematic maps on e.g. land use, soil types and soil erosion; groundwater recharge site selection; remote sensing and GIS; and soil and water conservation structures. The book’s focus is on creating a land and water resource development plan and environmental management for groundwater recharge development using remote sensing and GIS technology in the case study region, which is situated in the Akola and Buldhana districts of Maharashtra. Its goal is to promote awareness for sustainable watershed development and planning in semi-arid regions by highlighting the problems of, and plans for, groundwater and surface water pollution and sustainable watershed development. These aspects are of great importance to watershed and natural resources planning and management, and need to be exploited and managed sustainably. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to all scientists, research scholars and graduate students of remote sensing, hydrology, hydrogeology, water resource engineering, agricultural engineering and related areas who want to acquire detailed information on watershed planning and sustainable water resource planning in semi-arid regions, or to find new methodologies and techniques for studying the feedback mechanisms between forms and processes.

It is often assumed that upstream land use practices have important impacts on water resources and affect the downstream users at a watershed scale, Payments by downstream users to upstream users for "environmental services" such as good water quality, less sediments or more regular water flow are widely discussed. However, much controversy exists about the direction and magnitude of such impacts, how they influence the relationships between upstream and down-stream users, and which mechanisms allow for a sharing of resulting benefits and costs by all resource users in a watershed context. To address these issues, the FAO Land and Water Development Division organized the electronic workshop "Land-Water Linkages in Rural Watersheds" from 18 September to 27 October 2000. The present publication contains the proceedings of the workshop and two papers that set the stage for the workshop discussions. The complete workshop documentation, including discussion archive, background papers, and case studies, is included on the CD-ROM that accompanies the document.