A guide to forest–water management


Book Description

Many people worldwide lack adequate access to clean water to meet basic needs, and many important economic activities, such as energy production and agriculture, also require water. Climate change is likely to aggravate water stress. As temperatures rise, ecosystems and the human, plant, and animal communities that depend on them will need more water to maintain their health and to thrive. Forests and trees are integral to the global water cycle and therefore vital for water security – they regulate water quantity, quality, and timing and provide protective functions against (for example) soil and coastal erosion, flooding, and avalanches. Forested watersheds provide 75 percent of our freshwater, delivering water to over half the world’s population. The purpose of A Guide to Forest–Water Management is to improve the global information base on the protective functions of forests for soil and water. It reviews emerging techniques and methodologies, provides guidance and recommendations on how to manage forests for their water ecosystem services, and offers insights into the business and economic cases for managing forests for water ecosystem services. Intact native forests and well-managed planted forests can be a relatively cheap approach to water management while generating multiple co-benefits. Water security is a significant global challenge, but this paper argues that water-centered forests can provide nature-based solutions to ensuring global water resilience.




Riparian Areas


Book Description

The Clean Water Act (CWA) requires that wetlands be protected from degradation because of their important ecological functions including maintenance of high water quality and provision of fish and wildlife habitat. However, this protection generally does not encompass riparian areasâ€"the lands bordering rivers and lakesâ€"even though they often provide the same functions as wetlands. Growing recognition of the similarities in wetland and riparian area functioning and the differences in their legal protection led the NRC in 1999 to undertake a study of riparian areas, which has culminated in Riparian Areas: Functioning and Strategies for Management. The report is intended to heighten awareness of riparian areas commensurate with their ecological and societal values. The primary conclusion is that, because riparian areas perform a disproportionate number of biological and physical functions on a unit area basis, restoration of riparian functions along America's waterbodies should be a national goal.




Watershed Development Projects in India


Book Description

The Green Revolution that transformed irrigated agriculture elsewhere in India had little effect in the rainfed, semi-arid regions. Agricultural productivity remained low, natural resources were degrading, and the people were poor. In the 1980s and 1990s, planners turned to watershed management to develop rainfed agriculture while conserving natural resources. By the late 1990s, India was spending US$500 million a year on watershed development projects. Strategies ranged from the purely technical to those that emphasized social organization. Little systematic analysis exists, however, on the success of the different approaches. This study, based on a survey of 86 villages in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra states, attempts to fill that information gap by evaluating the projects' relative success in raising agricultural productivity, improving natural resource management, and reducing poverty. In looking at the question of what approaches enable a project to succeed, it uses both quantitative and qualitative analysis to compare project and nonproject villages before and after the projects were implemented. The authors find that projects involving the villagers in planning and decisionmaking performed better than their technocratic, top-down counterparts, but projects that combined participation with sound technical input performed best of all. All projects faced difficulties in ensuring that poor people shared the benefits of watershed development.




More Crop Per Drop


Book Description

This volume is an analytical summary and a critical synthesis of research at the International Water Management Institute over the past decade under its evolving research paradigm known popularly as 'more crop per drop'. The research synthesized here covers the full range of issues falling in the larger canvas of water-food-health-environment interface. Besides its immediate role in sharing knowledge with the research, donor, and policy communities, this volume also has a larger purpose of promoting a new way of looking at the water issues within the broader development context of food, livelihood, health and environmental challenges. More crop per drop: Revisiting a research paradigm contrasts the acquired wisdom and fresh thinking on some of the most challenging water issues of our times. It describes new tools, approaches, and methodologies and also illustrates them with practical application both from a global perspective and within the local and regional contexts of Asia and Africa. Since this volume brings together all major research works of IWMI, including an almost exhaustive list of citations, in one single set of pages, it is very valuable not only as a reference material for researchers and students but also as a policy tool for decision-makers and development agencies.




Urban Stormwater Management in the United States


Book Description

The rapid conversion of land to urban and suburban areas has profoundly altered how water flows during and following storm events, putting higher volumes of water and more pollutants into the nation's rivers, lakes, and estuaries. These changes have degraded water quality and habitat in virtually every urban stream system. The Clean Water Act regulatory framework for addressing sewage and industrial wastes is not well suited to the more difficult problem of stormwater discharges. This book calls for an entirely new permitting structure that would put authority and accountability for stormwater discharges at the municipal level. A number of additional actions, such as conserving natural areas, reducing hard surface cover (e.g., roads and parking lots), and retrofitting urban areas with features that hold and treat stormwater, are recommended.




Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards


Book Description

Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards presents a broad range of current approaches to measuring vulnerability. It provides a comprehensive overview of different concepts at the global, regional, national, and local levels, and explores various schools of thought. More than 40 distinguished academics and practitioners analyse quantitative and qualitative approaches, and examine their strengths and limitations. This book contains concrete experiences and examples from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe to illustrate the theoretical analyses.The authors provide answers to some of the key questions on how to measure vulnerability and they draw attention to issues with insufficient coverage, such as the environmental and institutional dimensions of vulnerability and methods to combine different methodologies.This book is a unique compilation of state-of-the-art vulnerability assessment and is essential reading for academics, students, policy makers, practitioners, and anybody else interested in understanding the fundamentals of measuring vulnerability. It is a critical review that provides important conclusions which can serve as an orientation for future research towards more disaster resilient communities.




Integrated River Basin Governance


Book Description

Integrated River Basin Governance - Learning from International Experience is designed to help practitioners implement integrated approaches to river basin management (IRBM). It aims to help the coming generation of senior university students learn how to design IRBM and it provides current researchers and the broader water community with a resource on river basin management. Drawing on both past and present river basin and valley scale catchment management examples from around the world, the book develops an integration framework for river basin management. Grounded in the theory and literature of natural resources management and planning, the thrust of the book is to assist policy and planning, rather than extend knowledge of hydrology, biophysical modelling or aquatic ecology. Providing a classification of river basin organizations and their use, the book also covers fundamental issues related to implementation: decision-making. institutions and organizations. information management. participation and awareness. legal and economic issues. integration and coordination processes. building human capacity. Integrated River Basin Governance focuses on the social, economic, organizational and institutional arrangements of river basin management. Methods are outlined for implementing strategic and regional approaches to river basin management, noting the importance of context and other key elements which have been shown to impede success. The book includes a range of tools for river basin governance methods, derived from real life experiences in both developed and developing countries. The successes and failures of river basin management are discussed, and lessons learned from both are presented. The ebook for this title is available to download for free on the WaterWiki.




Managing aquifer recharge


Book Description