Early decision support for integrated water resource management

The establishment of an integrated water resource management (IWRM) is vital to equally consider technical, social, political and environmental issues related to water management. Reaching IWRM requires small gradual steps of broadening knowledge and public awareness, improving and integrating institutional, legal and financial mechanisms, implementing cost-efficient technologies and solving social conflicts. The tools, presented in this article, support a rapid water resource assessment that may help to recognize and list the most important concerns and identify priority areas. On the basis of this early assessment, more detailed investigations can be carried out later. Solving just acute problems should be avoided. Instead all problems should be assessed and for their solution all known traditional and modern technical and administrative measures should be considered. If only certain details are studied, often simple solutions that are easy, socially accepted, and quick to implement are missed out. After a questionnaire prepared for a comprehensive assessment of the state of water resource management is used when approaching different stakeholders, the desired objectives are decided together with main stakeholders. Answers are used to screen existing general measure catalogues for predefined geo-hydrologic and socio-cultural constraints. The remaining applicable measures are arranged in an implementation oriented hierarchal organisation of objectives and measures according to level of detail, from which the relationships between objectives, administrative and technical measures are automatically visualized in a large illustration. Among possible direct and indirect cost and benefits, the most relevant socio-economic features are selected and analysed. The top- down scenario development for sustainable master planning can be conducted regardless of data availability. However, the bottom-up estimation of the current state, objective priorities, impacts and abatement costs of potential measures depends strongly on how much data is available. How measures within each level of the hierarchy can be compared and ranked with an analytic hierarchy process and/or marginal abatement cost curves, is exemplified by an exurb from a reference project. The proposed tools can be gradually completed with results from studies by different parties, to finally serve as a tool for making water management, financial and political decisions.

کلیدواژه ها:

Integrated water resource management ، scenario development ، socio-economic criteria ، analytic hierarchy process