The rapidly changing global water management landscape

Abstract

The rapidly changing global water management landscape Rapidly changing global conditions will make water resources management and provision of services increasingly complex-more than ever before in human history. These changing conditions will be precipitated by issues like population (number and structure), urbanization, industrialization, economic development, growth of the global middle class and their increasing aspirations for a better standard and quality of life, environmental quality, ecosystems needs, changing societal attitudes and perceptions, and their interactions. Climate change and fluctuations are already adding extra levels of uncertainty. Continued mismanagement and poor governance practices all over the world spanning several decades have ensured that water security for humankind is at a crossroads at present. Numerous policy and market failures in the water sector have received limited corrective attention from policy makers and governing institutions. The result has been misuse, over-exploitation and contamination of water all over the developed and developing worlds, though their magnitudes and extents vary over space and time. There is an urgent need to formulate and implement future-oriented, business-unusual water policies and strategies that can reform and strengthen public institutions, properly manage urban and rural environments, increase public-and private-sector investments, encourage prompt adoption of available and forthcoming new technologies, consider good management practices irrespective of where they originate, and develop a new generation of capable managers and experts from different disciplines and sectors with good analytical and communication skills. Historically, water management policies and plans have been mostly framed narrowly on a sectoral basis, with very limited consideration of future drivers from other sectors which are likely to affect water management increasingly profoundly, in both quantity and quality. Very seldom have water managers considered addressing societal attitudes and perceptions of water-related issues, and how they are likely to change in the future. The emphasis continues to be on short-term fashionable solutions like Integrated Water Resources Management and Integrated River Basin Management, neither of which has been able to provide sustainable and implementable policies or solutions for macro-and meso-scale projects and programmes over at least two generations. These non-performing concepts will become even more irrelevant in a future world which will be more complex, uncertain and unpredictable. Future water problems cannot be solved by using past paradigms and experiences that have not proven to be effective (Biswas & Tortajada, in press). The dynamics of the human future will be determined not by any single issue but by the constant interactions between a multitude of them. Increasing population, urbanization, industrialization, globalization and human aspirations will require more economic and equitable development and improved managem...

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