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Water Resources Management

Water Resources Management: A Vital and Interdisciplinary Discipline

The stewardship of water is, without doubt, one of our most important responsibilities because life would simply not exist without water supplies for the environment and society. Water can also be destructive when flood waters ravage rivers and coastal zones, while at the same time shaping the Earth and renewing natural systems. These aspects of water as an essential resource and a powerful natural force create the problem space where water resources managers work.

Water resources management has the core purpose of managing water in all necessary ways to serve society and the environment. This requires water resources managers to apply scientific and management knowledge to make important decisions in the broad public interest. They address a diverse range of problems and can enter the field from different disciplinary backgrounds, such as engineering, law, hydrology, ecology, chemistry, finance, and others.

The problem space for water resources management includes situations with different types, levels, and complexities. Just as water must be shared, problems about managing it involve multiple people and must be addressed collectively. In studying water resources management, we consider problems in the abstract, like "global water problems," and in specific situations, like "find the best way to expand our city's water treatment plant." So, problem identification depends on the situation involving your needs or those of another person or group. After the unmet needs are identified, then a problem statement will specify what the problem or unmet need is, who is responsible, and why it is important to solve the problem or meet the need.

Water resources management involves solution of analytical problems, synthesis of solutions, and coordinating among diverse interests. The issues are compelling, and the bar is high. They were summed up by President John F. Kennedy, who said "Anyone who solves the problem of water deserves not one Nobel Prize, but two - one for science and the other for peace." The quote captures the challenge: water resources management involves science and requires conflict resolution to help with peace.

This chapter defines water resources management and introduces problem identification and solution approaches. It explains why water resources management is important and how it works by applying knowledge from engineering and science, as well as diverse disciplines focused on governance, planning, law, and finance, among other topics. A shared understanding of these is needed, and the book seeks to explain and illustrate this knowledge in the form of principles, tools, methods, and common situations faced by water resources managers.

Defining Water Resources Management

While there is no consensus definition of water resources management, in a broad sense it is a process to allocate and control water resources and water infrastructure to achieve economic, social, and environmental goals. Allocating water resources means to divide up wet water among competing users and to distribute its resource benefits, like hydroelectric energy or water for navigation, among stakeholders. Controlling water resources also involves infrastructure, such as dams, as well as non-structural problem-solving, such as through regulatory programs.

The apparent reason for lack of consensus about the definition of water resources management is that practitioners have different perspectives that depend on their responsibilities, and academics have different disciplinary perspectives. Types of responsibilities might include supplying water, regulating wastewater, or controlling floods, for example. Levels of responsibilities might range from specific tasks like turning a valve to comprehensive government policy-setting about water. Academic perspectives include engineering, earth science, law, and economics, among others. For purposes here, water resources management is considered as a general concept that includes the full range of perspectives of both practitioners and academics. Examples are provided throughout the book to illustrate them.

With this broad range of perspectives and applications, the concept of water resources management might seem too general. However, the connectivity of water issues among many situations demands such a general approach to serve collective needs. The need to address connectivity drives a continuing search for an integrative way to apply water resources management. Several names are used for this integrative approach, especially Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), which builds on basic steps to provide tools to plan systems and solve problems. IWRM is explained in more detail in Chapter 23.

It is useful to view water resources management as occurring at three levels. The lowest or operator level involves basic operations of equipment like pumps and valves. The intermediate level extends to making decisions about water allocation, diversion, treatment, and other processes. At the highest level, it focuses more on stakeholder views, political issues, regulatory and legal constraints, and relationships with other sectors and may be called IWRM or by similar names. The three levels might be labelled water management, water resources management, and integrated water resources management, but consensus about such names is unlikely to occur.

The focus here is on a generic approach that can be adapted to any of the levels, but mainly to the intermediate and higher levels. The lower level involves more structured situations with fewer variables. Figure 1.1 shows a conceptual model of the basic steps of this generic approach of water resources management to different types of problem scenarios and actions.

In a water resources situation requiring management, some issues will require attention. Common situations recur in different contexts, such as supplying water, managing water quality, reducing flood risk, or resolving conflicts. Sometimes the problem at hand is clear, but other times it is bundled with other issues. For example, a food shortage may be exacerbated by water scarcity, which stems from poor water resources management. The managers working on the food shortage must work with water managers to address the problem jointly.

In the process, stakeholders must decide to initiate action and determine what to do. This can involve a planning phase that can take on different forms. This phase is important because it is where stakeholders work out conflicts, determine strategies, assemble resources, and develop plans of implementation. Once a course of action is determined, different interventions may be involved, like construction or modification of infrastructure, regulatory actions, operational changes, or development of policy, among other actions. These may involve different roles and stakeholders. Once a situation has been mostly resolved, a period of monitoring and assessment is used to determine if the water resources management mechanisms are successful. If not, a corrective phase will be needed, and this can involve further activities from incremental adaptive changes to litigation and conflict resolution.

Figure 1.1 Water resources management steps.

The actions shown in Figure 1.1 involve a workforce from diverse organizations with different disciplinary backgrounds and varying capacities. The organizations might include a water supply or wastewater authority, an irrigation district or company, a groundwater district, an electric power utility, a river basin authority, or regulator, for example. These involve different stakeholders and support groups, which also offer jobs in water resources management. As examples, consultants, government agencies, and utilities offer different kinds of jobs, and vendors of water management equipment also require skilled workers. Many kinds of water users, such as large farms and industries, also employ water managers.

Applications of Water Resources Management

Water resources management problems can often be understood from a picture of how the media reports them. For example, a story might focus on a drought that is allegedly caused by climate change. This situation can be depicted by use of a DPSIR diagram, which is a construct to show cause-effect relationships in social-ecological systems. The DPSIR displays the Drivers that affect water, the Pressures these drivers create, the resulting State of water resources, the Impacts, and the Responses from society.

As an example, Figure 1.2 depicts a basic DPSIR diagram for drought. Drivers like climate change and population growth create pressures, like depleted water storage and increased demands for irrigation water. These lead to declaration of a drought that causes crop failure, income losses, and food shortages. These urgent matters elicit responses such as mobilization of a drought response team, government relief, and new water storage projects.

Purposes of Water Resources Management

As problems like drought are confronted, solutions often have multiple purposes which show the range of applications of water resources management. Table 1.1 summarizes the most common water resources management purposes that occur. Each purpose has a name that will recur in discussions throughout the book.

As these purposes are pursued by water resources managers, a common set of scenarios or problem...