Sustainable water management (SWM) requires allocating between competing water sector demands, and balancing the financial and social resources required to support necessary water systems. The objective of this review is to assess SWM in three sectors: urban, agricultural, and natural systems. This review explores the following questions: (1) How is SWM defined and evaluated? (2) What are the challenges associated with sustainable development in each sector? (3) What are the areas of greatest potential improvement in urban and agricultural water management systems? And (4) What role does country development status have in SWM practices? The methods for evaluating water management practices range from relatively simple indicator methods to integration of multiple models, depending on the complexity of the problem and resources of the investigators. The two key findings and recommendations for meeting SWM objectives are:(1) all forms of water must be considered usable, and reusable, water resources; and (2) increasing agricultural crop water production represents the largest opportunity for reducing total water consumption, and will be required to meet global food security needs. The level of regional development should not dictate sustainability objectives, however local
OPEN ACCESSWater 2014, 6 3935 infrastructure conditions and financial capabilities should inform the details of water system design and evaluation.
The concept of sustainability has come to permeate many spheres of governance, decisionmaking and scientific inquiry. Although current academic conceptualizations of sustainability often acknowledge the conflicts inherent in the pursuit of sustainable development, the present discourse does not explicitly include the concepts of peace and conflict. This omission has been in error, as the pursuits of sustainable environmental governance and sustainable human development are themselves efforts to manage and resolve conflict. Thus, this article advocates for an expanded framework of sustainability that operates at the nexus of conflict, environment and development by exploring current mainstream conceptualizations of sustainability and illustrating the direct connections between sustainability and the fields of peace studies and conflict resolution. It goes on to discuss the utility of applying a complex systems approach to the expanded conceptualization of sustainability, including aspects of both coupled systems and dynamical systems theory, in order to provide an analytical framework for studying mechanisms that enable sustainable development by dealing explicitly with conflicting needs and interests among actors in social-ecological systems. Copyright
Given the linkages between natural resources and social conflicts, evidence increasingly shows that successful natural resource management requires conflict mitigation and prevention. However, there may be a gap in practice between knowing what processes and tools need to be used to manage conservation conflicts and how to actually implement them. We present learning from a practice-based case study of conflict management in the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon that aimed to develop natural resource governance institutions and build stakeholder capacity, including of indigenous groups, to navigate existing conflict resolution mechanisms. Through applying good practices in conservation conflict management and collaborative governance, we generated important lessons on the practical considerations involved in collaborative conservation. These lessons, while specific to our case, could be applied to a variety of protected areas facing complex socialecological systems dynamics and wicked problems.
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