Sustainable Water Management
Sustainable Water Management
A definition
Defining Sustainable Water Management
Sustainable Water Management in India
Factors limiting the adoption of SWM (India and the South Asia Region)
What is Sustainable Water Management? The term uses two important concepts with respect to water: sustainability and management. In order to understand Sustainable Water Management, it is important to define these concepts.
Sustainability
The Bruntland Report popularized the term sustainability for human and environmental development when it was published in 1987.In the report, sustainable activities were defined as ones where the needs of the present generation are met without compromising the needs of future generations.
What the Bruntland definition implies is an equitable distribution of the resource not only spatially between users in a given location, but temporally between users over time.The idea is to allocate the resource in such a way as for all, including the environment, to have an adequate share without making any one group worse off, both now and in the future.
To achieve sustainability, there must be a rethinking of what we consider a basic need.It is common in our society to say that we need a given resource, but how much of it do we really need to use?Also, how do we decide what the basic needs of our ecosystem and the organisms living within it are?Defining what constitutes a basic need is perhaps the greatest challenge to adopting sustainable practices in our daily lives, as interpretations of need vary widely from region to region, village to village and even from person to person.
Management
There has been a shift in recent years from the traditional ‘top-down’ approach to a more open management system where all levels have a say in the allocation and use of the resource.If properly done, this system ensures that the needs and concerns of those most affected by the use of the resource are addressed, without loosing sight of the
A definition
Defining Sustainable Water Management
Sustainable Water Management in India
Factors limiting the adoption of SWM (India and the South Asia Region)
What is Sustainable Water Management? The term uses two important concepts with respect to water: sustainability and management. In order to understand Sustainable Water Management, it is important to define these concepts.
Sustainability
The Bruntland Report popularized the term sustainability for human and environmental development when it was published in 1987.In the report, sustainable activities were defined as ones where the needs of the present generation are met without compromising the needs of future generations.
What the Bruntland definition implies is an equitable distribution of the resource not only spatially between users in a given location, but temporally between users over time.The idea is to allocate the resource in such a way as for all, including the environment, to have an adequate share without making any one group worse off, both now and in the future.
To achieve sustainability, there must be a rethinking of what we consider a basic need.It is common in our society to say that we need a given resource, but how much of it do we really need to use?Also, how do we decide what the basic needs of our ecosystem and the organisms living within it are?Defining what constitutes a basic need is perhaps the greatest challenge to adopting sustainable practices in our daily lives, as interpretations of need vary widely from region to region, village to village and even from person to person.
Management
There has been a shift in recent years from the traditional ‘top-down’ approach to a more open management system where all levels have a say in the allocation and use of the resource.If properly done, this system ensures that the needs and concerns of those most affected by the use of the resource are addressed, without loosing sight of the