Goals for water governance
From Water Wiki
These are some goals that have been suggested, explicitly or implicitly, by commenters to the water allocation study:
- Assure an ample supply of freshwater for productive uses
- Assure an ample supply of clean water for fish, wildlife and aquatic ecosystems in general.
- Maintain the public's paramount rights to and control over freshwater.
- Improve the resilience of freshwater systems.
- Improve the fairness of water allocation. Fairness involves several dimensions, and they are not always aligned:
- the burdens of drought and other extraordinary problems are shared widely
- the benefits of good planning and investment are assured to those who did the planning and investment
- those least able to protect themselves and assure themselves adequate water are not exploited by those who are better off.
- Make the administrative system for water management simple and science-based
- Institutionalize adaptive (flexible) management
Fresh water is increasingly the subject of global discussion and analysis, and some of these discussions have produced useful statements of goals for water governance. Here is the Ministerial Declaration from the 2nd World Water Forum.
The ongoing series of World Water Forums (Marrakech 1997, Hague 2000, Kyoto 2003, Mexico 2006), organized by the World Water Council and its partners, brings together a broad array of thousands of stakeholders to discuss strategies for sustainable development with respect to water. While there have been three such gatherings as of 2008, outputs from the affiliated Ministerial Conference of the 2nd Forum are most relevant to [this study.] This Ministerial Declaration captures the interconnections among ecosystem integrity, human actions affecting water supply, and human well-being. It is precisely these interactions that define the contemporary conditions and trends and that are suggestive of responses that foster water stewardship, sustainable water use, and progress toward development. These fundamental goals highlight the need for well-functioning ecosystems. They also reflect strongly the Millennium Development Goals:
• meeting basic human needs—that is, access to safe and sufficient water and sanitation, which are essential to health and human well-being;
• securing the food supply to enhance food security through a more efficient mobilization and use of water for food production; • protecting ecosystems and ensuring their integrity through sustainable water resources management;
• sharing water resources to promote peaceful cooperation and develop synergies between the different uses of water within and between the states concerned;
• managing risks to provide security from floods, droughts, pollution, and other water-related hazards; • valuing water to manage it in a way that reflects economic, social, environmental, and cultural values for all its uses; and
• governing water wisely to ensure good governance, including public participation.[1]
Ultimately, water resource management cannot meet everyone's individual needs, all the time. For example, if you build houses in the flood plain, you make management for flood avoidance more critical, and maybe impossible, especially in light of conflicting needs to hold water for water supply. In other words, there are important things outside water resources management (especially in land use and development) that importantly affect people's satisfaction with water management decisions.
Notes
- ↑ Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, Chapter 7, Fresh water
