World Water Day 1999: Five Key Issues
Problems with the way water resources are being managed take many forms and affect billions of people and many sensitive environments around the world. These pressures produce scarcities. From these scarcities come conflicts, which are exacerbated by the lack of institutional structures to mediate them.
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“...a growing population will cause an increasing stress on water resources. It will be enormous task to find a balance between industrial use, agricultural use, use for households and nature conservation. The consequences of this competition (on food security, on trade, on need for new technology and need for education) will call for strong policy responses, both nationally and internationally. Together, water demands are so high that a number of large rivers decrease in volume as they flow downstream, with the result that downstream users face shortages, and ecosystems suffer, both in rivers and in adjacent coastal areas”. Mrs. De Boer, Minister of Environment of The Netherlands, |
It is these issues which are the basis for the need for an integrated water resources management (IWRM) approach. From them emerge five key issues for policy development. They are:
- Balancing needs: creating the best balance between the different needs of all water resources.
- Conserving resources: managing water resources to maximize benefits for all without jeopardizing the quality and sustainability of the resources themselves or the ecosystems they support.
- Upstream and downstream: managing water resources in ways which do not affect the quality or quantity of these resources available to users downstream
- Dealing with variability: minimizing the effects of variable and uncertain character of water resources.
- Appropriate management: putting the most appropriate management systems in place for IWRM, at the river basin level.
Issues that have brought about the need for IWRM at national level are even more apparent internationally. Particularly sharing the scarce resources of international rivers, but also water quantity issues and hazards such as floods, droughts and discharge of hazardous substances have emphasized the need for the integrated management of international river basins and coastal zones. It is increasingly realized that river basins and coastal zones are part of the same river system. However, the management of international river systems is often troubles by international relations, and indeed can be a cause of troubles in these relations. Several authors have stressed the danger of imminent wars in river basins such as the Nile, the Jordan, the Euphrates and the Ganges, and potential conflicts in Southern Africa, South America, South - East Asia and the Middle East.