The Sustainable Development of Water Resources

Water resources management is one of the most important challenges the world faces. It is difficult to think of a resource more essential to the health of human communities or their economies than water. Humans cannot live for more than several days without water, shorter than for any source of sustenance other than fresh air. In meeting their demand for water, societies extract vast quantities from rivers, lakes, wetlands, and underground aquifers to supply the requirements of cities, farms, and industries. The summer of 2002 in the United States will be remembered for putting Americans from coast to coast through one of the worst droughts in decades. While experts discussed the links between water shortages, erratic weather conditions, and population growth, there is also evidence that the way we grow—development patterns—can exacerbate problems with both water quality and quantity. And ironically, water supply is no longer just a western issue in the United States. We are drinking, irrigating, and using water faster than precipitation can replenish groundwater from the Great Plains to the Chicago suburbs to the Florida Everglades. There is also growing recognition that functionally intact and biologically complex freshwater ecosystems provide many economically valuable commodities and services to society (ecosystem services) beyond simply direct water supply. These services include flood control, transportation, recreation, purification of human and industrial wastes, habitat for plants and animals, and production of fish and other foods and marketable goods. These ecosystem benefits are costly and often impossible to replace when aquatic systems are degraded. Deliberations about water allocation should therefore, always include provisions for maintaining the integrity of freshwater ecosystems, including the need to maintain minimum in-stream flows and to anticipate the impact of hydrologic modifications on downstream environments (Flint, et al., 1996). Otherwise, we have few safeguards that will protect the systems that sustain us. Besides being an integral part of the ecosystem, water is a social and economic good. Demand for water resources of sufficient quantity and quality for human consumption, sanitation, agricultural irrigation, and manufacturing will continue to intensify as populations increase and as global urbanization, industrialization, and commercial development accelerates (Flint and Houser, 2001). Water runs like a river through our lives, touching everything from our vigor and the fitness of natural ecosystems around us to farmers’ fields and the production of goods we consume. It is critical that efforts intended to be sustainable fully consider the health and operation of aquatic ecosystems and that the environmental value of watersheds be recognized when making economic and social decisions on water allocation and use.