There is growing interest in water accounting, why it is needed, what benefits it brings, and equally important, how it can be put into practice. Water accounting is not a new idea, yet it is an alarmingly simple one. It is about quantifying water resources and uses of water, much like financial accounts provide information on income and expenditure. Interest in water accounting is based on the premise that ‘We cannot plan and manage what we do not measure’ – a statement that few would disagree with. However, given the current focus on water as a precious and limiting resource, the risks of extreme floods and droughts, and water’s central role in the 2030 Agenda, it is difficult to understand why so little attention is given to water accounting and to making sure we have enough water. Indeed, estimates suggest that by 2050, if we continue with our current approach to water management, global water demand will exceed supply by over 40%, which would put at risk 45% of global GDP, 52% of the world’s population, and 40% of grain production (WWDR, 2016). This concern is supported by the World Economic Forum that consistently ranks water crises as a top global risk (WEF, 2015). Reports from South Africa (January 2018) suggesting that Cape Town may be the world’s first major city to face the prospect of running out of water following severe drought, is a timely ‘wake-up call’ for everyone to focus on accounting for water.

Water Footprint Assessment is a young research field that considers how freshwater use, scarcity, and pollution relate to consumption, production, and trade patterns. This book presents a wide range of studies within this new field. It is argued that collective and coordinated action—at different scale levels and along all stages of commodity supply chains—is necessary to bring about more sustainable, efficient, and equitable water use. The presented studies range from farm to catchment and country level, and show how different actors along the supply chain of final commodities can contribute to more sustainable water use in the chain.

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Economical, Political, and Social Issues in Water Resources provides a fully comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of all three factors in their relation to water resources. Economic issues consist of Water accounting, Water economy, Water pricing, Water market, Water bank and bourse. Political issues consist of Water power and hydrogemistry, Water diplomacy and hydropolitics, Water rights and water laws, Water governance and policy, Shared water resources management, Water management systems, and social issues consist of Water and culture, civilization and history, Water quality, hygiene, and health, Water and society. This book familiarizes researchers with all aspects of the field, which can lead to optimized and multidimensional water resources management. Some of abovementioned issues are new, so the other aim of this book is to identify them in order to researchers can easily find them and use them in their studies. - Includes diverse case studies from around the world - Presents contributions from global and diverse contributors with interdisciplinary backgrounds, including water engineers, scientists, planners the economic, political and social issues surrounding water - Contains in-depth definitions and concepts of each topic

Effective water governance capacity is the foundation of efficient management of water resources. Water governance reform processes must work towards building capacity in a cohesive and articulated approach that links national policies, laws and institutions, within an enabling environment that allows for their implementation. This guide shows how national water reform processes can deliver good water governance, by focussing on the principles and practice of reform. RULE guides managers and decision makers on a journey which provides an overview of what makes good law, policy and institutions, and the steps needed to build a coherent and fully operational water governance structure.

The privatization of water supply and wastewater systems, together with institutional restructuring of governance – through decentralization and the penetration of global firms in local and regional markets – have been promoted as solutions to increase economic efficiency and achieve universal water supply and sanitation coverage. Yet a significant share of service provision and water resources development remains the responsibility of public authorities. The chapters in this book – with case evidence from Argentina, Chile, France, the USA, and other countries – address critical questions that dominate the international agenda on public versus private utilities, service provision, regulations, and resource development. This book presents varied perspectives – largely complementary but at times contrasting – on public and private governance of water. Public authority in general is being reasserted over service provision, while resource development and investments in infrastructure continue as a mix of public and private initiatives. But more important, increased oversight and regulation of market-based initiatives that until recently were touted as panaceas for water supply and sanitation are increasingly being reconsidered on the basis of social equity, environmental, and public health concerns. This book was based on the special issue of Water International.

This groundbreaking book examines the role that water accounting can play in resolving economic, environmental and social issues. One of the most pressing global issues of the 21st century is the scarcity of water to ensure economic, environmental and social sustainability. In addressing the issue through policy and management, access to high quality information is critically important. But water scarcity has many implications, and it is possible that different reporting approaches, generally called water accounting systems, can be appropriate to addressing them. In this key book, international experts respond to the question: what role can water accounting play in resolving economic, social and environmental issues at individual, organizational, industry, national and international levels? They explore how various forms of water accounting are utilized and the issues that they address. Academics and postgraduate students interested in water scarcity and accounting will find this book invaluable. Policymakers in all areas relating to water as well as environmentalists, water industry managers and water lawyers will find plenty of important insights in this essential resource.

The United Nations World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) is hosted and led by UNESCO. WWAP brings together the work of 31 UN-Water Members as well as 37 Partners to publish the United Nations World Water Development Report (WWDR) series. Under the theme Water for Sustainable Development, the WWDR 2015 has been prepared as a contribution from UN-Water to the discussions surrounding the post-2015 framework for global sustainable development. Highlighting water's unique and often complex role in achieving various sustainable development objectives, the WWDR 2015 is addressed to policy- and decision-makers inside and outside the water community, as well as to anyone with an interest in freshwater and its many life-giving benefits. The report sets an aspirational yet achievable vision for the future of water towards 2050 by describing how water supports healthy and prosperous human communities, maintains well functioning ecosystems and ecological services, and provides a cornerstone for short and long-term economic development. It provides an overview of the challenges, issues and trends in terms of water resources, their use and water-related services like water supply and sanitation. The report also offers, in a rigorous yet accessible manner, guidance about how to address these challenges and to seize the opportunities that sound water management provides in order to achieve and maintain economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Biopolitics refers to a form of politics concerned with administering and regulating the conditions of life at an aggregated level of populations. This book provides a biopolitical perspective on water governance and its effects. It draws on the work of Foucault to explore how notions of scarcity are used in strategies of governance and how such governance differentiates between different populations. Furthermore, the author investigates what such biopolitical regulation means for people’s lifestyles and the way they understand themselves and their moral responsibilities as humans, individuals and citizens. The book begins by investigating the global water agenda, with a particular emphasis on its focus on water for basic needs, and provides different examples of hydromentalities around the world. It also presents rich empirical details of one local case in South Africa. By carefully exploring the water 'stories' of water users, the book provides new perspectives on the relationship between water and power. Additionally, it offers an innovative methodological framework through which we can study the workings of governance more generally, and water governance specifically. It thereby contributes to the scholarship on water governance in relation to how water governance and technologies are part of producing subjectivities, notions of life and lifestyles and, more specifically, how the global water agenda can work so as to produce, or further entrench, distinctions between different lives and lifestyles. Ultimately, such differences between individuals and populations that are produced as an effect of water governance are assessed in relation to social sustainability.