What Makes Water Resources Management So Complicated? - Where Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) Gets Attention.

What makes water resources management so complicated?

This is a fundamental question that we all have to think about when talking about water as a resource .

To begin with, the question above in essence points out the nature of water. It does not stay at the same point of geographical location, but moves across the world through the atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike, 2015). It involves some physical processes known as evaporation, condensation, precipitation, interception, infiltration, percolation, transpiration, runoff and storage (NOAA). The detailed descriptions are given here. This is now widely recognised as the hydrological cycle of the Earth.

As water sometimes changes the chemical property such as from H2O to H2 in the flowing processes, it might sound a bit too general to define water resources just as 'H2O'. However, I will stick to the chemical definition because we generally refer to water storage only in the lithosphere and hydrosphere when talking about water resources, and it is essentially in liquid form (H2O). It would be very interesting to explore some potential technology that can extract water from the atmosphere or biosphere (perhaps where geoengineering can work in the future). However, I will not go in details because it is not my primary concern in this blog. Figure. 1 below illustrates a whole picture of the water cycle.


Figure.1. A graph shows the hydrological cycle of the Earth. Flows of water are annotated in red arrow. Stores include lakes, snow glaciers, oceans, groundwater and water vapour in the atmosphere. (Reference: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike, 2015)

Over a long, but geologically very short period of human's history, people have adapted themselves to withdraw water from various sources, mainly lakes, rivers, groundwater and rainwater. As it is an essential element of human's life, water has long been sustainably managed unless any anomalous climatic events, disasters or resource wars happened.

Nowadays, however, the water resources are undergoing historical declines both in quantity and quality as a result of unsustainable use of water by humans. Some of the contributing factors include the rapid growth of population and socio-economic development both of which have led to an ever increasing demand for water. They are frequently exploited to meet not only a greater demand for domestic usage but for agricultural, industrial and even recreational purposes.

There are a number of regional / national programmes that aim to combat such problems. Taking the Netherlands as an example, the country has significantly improved industrial and urban water quality since 1970s (Mostert, 2006). Although pollution from agriculture such as nitrate and phosphate has still been a major problem in their water management, the country is now known for its long history of their effective management in the resources. Many of the current regional 'water boards' are traced back to the 15th century, which is 'a decentralised public authorities with legal tasks and a self-supporting financial system' (Waterschap Groot Salland). Despite some overlapping roles of national institutions in managing water quality recently, the country has a fairly good governance in water resources management as a result of historically well-constructed and co-operative regional organisations.

Nonetheless, the transnational nature of water described above often makes it very hard to achieve sustainable management of water resources in many other parts of the world where a catchment basin (watershed in North America) goes beyond political boundaries. Catchment basin basically refers to the whole geographical area where surface water from rivers, lakes or direct precipitation converges to flow into a single point downhill (SEAWA) (Figure.2). What usually happens is that as water freely flows in and out of the site of interest, the impact of using water at one point can influence the availability of water at another location which is hydrologically connected to the former site. To simplify matters, without mutual understanding and co-operation in usage of water, the resource can easily deteriorate both in quantity and quality over time.


Figure.2. A 3D diagram showing catchment basin (annotated as 'watershed' here). (Reference: SEAWA, 2014)


Therefore, in order to facilitate consistent management within a particular hydrological boundary, there needs to be a catchment-based approach, which allows to reflect all the relevant water cycles in management programme (Savenije and Zaag, 2009).Together with the involvement of all the stakeholders who have interests in the resource, this new type of management method is now known as Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). The concept has been widely known across the world since its emergence in the Dublin Principle in 1992 (Savenije and Zaag, 2009). I think it is a very important landmark in the history of water resources management particularly when considering the trans-regional/national nature of the resources and its usage. Nevertheless, one must be aware that IWRM is not a solution nor a set of criteria that can assess how successful a particular management programme is. It essentially 'functions ideologically' and is just a concept that is interpreted NOT implemented (Mostert, 2006). Thus, in order to practically resolve any water-related issues, managers need to employ their own measures which are hydrologically unique while reflecting the conceptual ideas of IWRM in their policy.

By now, you would probably have your answer to the question raised at the beginning of this post. Any thoughts and questions are welcome, so please feel free to share your ideas in comment. :)

Freshwater Crisis Now On

Water is crucial for all lives on the Planet. It is one of the essential resources for plants and animals to grow, likewise, approximately 60% of the human body consists of water. The Earth itself also consists of water by 70%. However, only a small fraction of water is available as fresh (2.5%). Furthermore, only 1% of the freshwater is easily accessible because most of them are trapped at ice cap or glaciers (National Geographic). Therefore, only about 0.007% of the total amount of water on the Earth is currently available to us.

Then, the question is - can it feed everyone on the Earth? 

Well, the answer could be YES before the world population reached 6.8 billion, which is the maximum number of people that the Earth can support under the above freshwater accessibility (National Geographic). Now that the world population is above 7 billion, and the answer is unclear. With a declining quality of water associated with man-made pollution and exploitation of water source, the number of people the Earth can feed is further falling down. So, how can we mitigate the rate of declining freshwater availability?

The problem is that people perceive water scarcity from very different angles, depending on where they live. If you live in a city where basic infrastructure works properly, you would find it difficult to understand the recent global water crisis than those who live in the middle of continent where little water runs or is available in underground. In this case, the latter is perceived as being under physical water scarcity. Egypt is one of the examples because of its arid climate and lack of surface flow and groundwater. In fact, they import half of their food every year as they cannot produce crops sufficiently under the insufficient water resources (BBC). 

By contrast, if someone lives in places where the amount of water withdrawn from rivers or lakes is relatively smaller than its capacity, they are considered to be under economic water scarcity. Examples are seen in the central to south African continent where water availability is very small compared to its abundant source of groundwater and its tropical rainfall. What these examples tell us is that freshwater is unevenly distributed across the world and that the accessibility is highly dependent on economic status of regions/countries where people live. This is one of the factors that make it challenging to combat the issue of global water crisis.

Similarly, the quality of water is another problem in discussing water as resource. Since the quality standard required varies depending on the intended use, for instance, domestic drinking water and industrial processing water (Taylor, 2004). Furthermore, as water storage shows a considerable difference in the condition (e.g. rivers and lakes as surface water and groundwater), it puts a further constraint on estimating the amount of water available to people for life. Considering all these factors, therefore, the previously raised question cannot easily be addressed because of the complex nature of water resources.

So, what would be a potential solution for this global water crisis? Again, there is not a definite answer to the question because of the nature of water resource. Instead, I shall look into various examples of water resource management programme across the world in upcoming posts. A particular interest lies in a theorized concept of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) as a means of achieving sustainable development of water resources. Further explanation and motive on this thematic area shall be given in the next post.