This book reviews the concept, contemporary research efforts and the implementation of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). The IWRM concept was established as an international guiding water management paradigm in the early 1990ies and has become a vital approach to solving the problems associated with the topic of water. The book summarizes fourteen comprehensive IWRM research projects with worldwide coverage and analyses their motivations, settings, approaches and implementation of results. Aiming to be an up-to-date interdisciplinary scientific reference, this book provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis of contemporary IWRM research, examples of science based implementations and a synthesis of the lessons learnt. It concludes with some major future challenges, the solving of which will further strengthen the IWRM concept.

Sustainable Water Resources Management presents the most current thinking on the environmental, social, and political dimensions of sustainably managing the water supply at local, regional, or basin levels.

In this concise introduction to water resources, Shimon Anisfeld explores the fundamental interactions between humans and water, including drinking, sanitation, irrigation, and power production. The book familiarizes students with the current water crisis and with approaches for managing this essential resource more effectively in a time of rapid environmental and social change. Anisfeld addresses both human and ecological problems, including scarcity, pollution, disease, flooding, conflicts over water, and degradation of aquatic ecosystems. In addition to providing the background necessary to understand each of these problems, the book discusses ways to move towards better management and addresses the key current debates in the water policy field. In the past, water development has often proceeded in a single-sector fashion, with each group of users implementing its own plans without coordination with other groups, resulting in both conflict and inefficiency. Now, Anisfeld writes, the challenge of water management is figuring out how to balance all the different demands for water, from sanitation to energy generation to ecosystem protection. For inquiring students of any level, Water Resources provides a comprehensive one-volume guide to a complex but vital field of study.

Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond investigates climate change and sustainability through time, exploring how political control of water sources, maintenance of sustainable systems, ideological relationships with water, and fluctuations in water availability have affected and been affected by social change. Contributors focus on and build upon earlier investigations of the global diversity of water management systems and the successes and failures of their employment, while applying a multitude of perspectives on sustainability. The volume focuses primarily on the Precolumbian Maya but offers several analogous case studies outside the ancient Maya world that illustrate the pervasiveness of water’s role in sustainability, including an ethnographic study of the sustainability of small-scale, farmer-managed irrigation systems in contemporary New Mexico and the environmental consequences of Angkor’s growth into the world’s most extensive preindustrial settlement. The archaeological record offers rich data on past politics of climate change, while epigraphic and ethnographic data show how integrated the ideological, political, and environmental worlds of the Maya were. While Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond stresses how lessons from the past offer invaluable insight into current approaches of adaptation, it also advances our understanding of those adaptations by making the inevitable discrepancies between past and present climate change less daunting and emphasizing the sustainable negotiations between humans and their surroundings that have been mediated by the changing climate for millennia. It will appeal to students and scholars interested in climate change, sustainability, and water management in the archaeological record. Contributors: Mary Jane Acuña, Wendy Ashmore, Timothy Beach, Jeffrey Brewer, Christopher Carr, Adrian S. Z. Chase, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Carlos R. Chiriboga, Jennifer Chmilar, Nicholas Dunning, Maurits W. Ertsen, Roland Fletcher, David Friedel, Robert Griffin, Joel D. Gunn, Armando Anaya Hernández, Christian Isendahl, David Lentz, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Dan Penny, Kathryn Reese-Taylor, Michelle Rich, Cynthia Robin, Sylvia Rodríguez, William Saturno, Vernon Scarborough, Payson Sheets, Liwy Grazioso Sierra, Michael Smyth, Sander van der Leeuw, Andrew Wyatt

Recent studies of past climate and streamflow conditions have broadened understanding of long-term water availability in the Colorado River, revealing many periods when streamflow was lower than at any time in the past 100 years of recorded flows. That information, along with two important trends-a rapid increase in urban populations in the West and significant climate warming in the region-will require that water managers prepare for possible reductions in water supplies that cannot be fully averted through traditional means. Colorado River Basin Water Management assesses existing scientific information, including temperature and streamflow records, tree-ring based reconstructions, and climate model projections, and how it relates to Colorado River water supplies and demands, water management, and drought preparedness. The book concludes that successful adjustments to new conditions will entail strong and sustained cooperation among the seven Colorado River basin states and recommends conducting a comprehensive basinwide study of urban water practices that can be used to help improve planning for future droughts and water shortages.

Water deficiency in many arid and semi-arid regions in Southern Europe is becoming a major constraint for economic welfare and sustainable regional development. These regions are characterised by high spatial and temporal imbalances of water demand and supply, seasonal water uses, inadequate water resources and poor institutional water management. The aim of this book is to formulate appropriate strategies and guidelines for water management necessary for the formulation and implementation of integrated sustainable management of water resources. Lessons are learned from various case studies, which examine competing water use patterns, compare governance structures and how these have evolved in response to scarcity, and structural and non-structural instruments to address water deficiency. Water Management in Arid and Semi-Arid Regions will appeal to policymakers in relevant countries as well as to scholars and researchers of environmental studies and economics.

In December 2002, a group of specialists on water resources from the United States and Iran met in Tunis, Tunisia, for an interacademy workshop on water resources management, conservation, and recycling. This was the fourth interacademy workshop on a variety of topics held in 2002, the first year of such workshops. Tunis was selected as the location for the workshop because the Tunisian experience in addressing water conservation issues was of interest to the participants from both the United States and Iran. This report includes the agenda for the workshop, all of the papers that were presented, and the list of site visits.

In order to confront the increasingly severe water problems faced by all parts of the country, the United States needs to make a new commitment to research on water resources. A new mechanism is needed to coordinate water research currently fragmented among nearly 20 federal agencies. Given the competition for water among farmers, communities, aquatic ecosystems and other users-as well as emerging challenges such as climate change and the threat of waterborne diseases-Confronting the Nation's Water Problems concludes that an additional $70 million in federal funding should go annually to water research. Funding should go specifically to the areas of water demand and use, water supply augmentation, and other institutional research topics. The book notes that overall federal funding for water research has been stagnant in real terms for the past 30 years and that the portion dedicated to research on water use and social science topics has declined considerably.

Sustainable water management is a key environmental challenge of the 21st century. This book presents the very latest studies, methods and innovations for managing our water resources from the first International Conference on Adaptive and Integrated Water Management, held in November 2007 in Basel, Switzerland. The book addresses a wide interdisciplinary audience of scientists and professionals from academia, industry, and those involved in policy making.

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.