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. :)