Conflicts and security in integrated water resources management

Water sector reforms based on the concept of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) are criticized for not considering context, local realities or legitimacy during the implementation of water sector reforms. Universal remedies of IWRM can thus lead to resistance, conflicts and ultimately failures of interventions. This paper examines how conflicts and disharmony can be addressed by IWRM's instruments. It conceptualizes institutional security as a highly relevant issue to be addressed during water management interventions. Further, the paper advocates a reform of the holistic concept of IWRM to incorporate ‘peace and security’ as a new pillar of water management based on a broad understanding of societal goals that are embedded in the principles of good governance and sustainable development. It also reviews recent criticism of and debates in IWRM and explains the advantages of expanding the normative idea behind it.     

Complementary safeguards for robust regional watershed governance in a federation: New York City and its municipal water supply

In federations such as the United States, governments at various levels are experimenting with new watershed governance arrangements to protect water quality for both ecosystem health and human consumption. Such arrangements may bring previously uncooperative governments together to credibly commit to resource protection under the auspices of new and intricate formal institutions. Given the risks of cooperation, theory indicates that a robust arrangement will contain means of holding governing actors accountable to each other. This paper examines a purportedly successful case, the New York City watershed governance arrangement, to identify how safeguards against intergovernmental opportunism promote lasting cooperation. Using the qualitative method of process tracing, this paper finds that the New York City watershed governance arrangement uses structural, judicial, and popular safeguards against opportunistic behaviors by governing actors that might threaten the resource or the arrangement. The results indicate that such safeguards are present and interact with other safeguards and rule institutions at the state and federal level to maintain compliance.     

我国城市化过程中水土资源利用问题的认识——以长江下游地区若干城市地区为例

改革开放以来,我国城市化过程出现快速发展时期,特别是长江下游地区(长江三角洲及其周边地区),由于人口与产业不断集聚,重大基础设施项目投资加大,道路网密度增加,开发区扩大,使得城市空间迭加扩展,造成了严重的水土资源利用失衡,生态环境日趋恶化,使本地区城市发展出现了许多新问题.以长江下游地区为例,对本区城市化过程中有关水土资源环境恶化、水污染增加、土地资源流失,以及城镇化速度过快的情况,作了深入分析论证,同时对长江下游地区水土资源合理开发利用与保护提出了新的思维、新的方法措施,特别是对如何加强长三角地区水质环境的整治提出了4点切实可行的办法与措施,为本地区的经济发展与生态安全提供科学依据.     

成都冬季典型辐射逆温过程分析

本文利用测温声雷达的探测结果，借助同期探空和地面观测资料，分析了成都平原典型辐射逆温的生消演变规律，指出了其主要特征。这些结果对气候资源利用、污染气象条件的研究等具有重要意义。     

生物资源在农业减灾中的开发利用前景

论述了以水、旱为主的气象灾害和农作物病、虫、草、鼠所致的生物灾害对农业生产的灾害性影响, 同时阐述了有效开发利用生物资源是防止和减轻农业灾害的有效途径, 提出了加强生物资源的开发利用研究内容     

试论江苏省国土资源与区域可持续发展

国土资源是区域可持续发展的基础,国土资源的合理开发利用是区域持发展的必由之路。首先详细地分析了江苏国土资源的优势条件,然后着重阐述了江苏国土资源的劣势,指出 一个资源约束型省份人地关系紧张、气候灾害频敏、环境问题突出已严重制约着区域的可持续发展;最后,根据江苏省情,对江苏可持续发展提出如下建议;加强对地理区位的开发和利用,促进力的合理布局,严格控制人口增长,努力提高人口素质,严格保护耕地,高效利用     

DEVELOPING BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR WATER QUALITY MANAGEMENT1

ABSTRACT. Management of aquatic ecosystems requires a clear understanding of the goals to be achieved, appropriate information and the means to achieve the goals. Control measures applied to aquatic ecosystems, in the absence of information on the condition of the system, are apt to be inappropriate and thus may overprotect the receiving system at times and underprotect it at other times since the ability of ecosystems to receive wastes is not constant. A major determinant of the effectiveness and efficiency of ecological quality control is the lag time in the feedback of information. If the lag is too great, the control measures may repeatedly overshoot or undershoot the desired goal. Present techniques for measuring the responses of aquatic organisms and communities require days or weeks, whereas information for ecosystem quality control and prevention of ecological crises should be generated in minutes or hours as is the case for other quality control systems. Two biological monitoring systems have been developed to generate information rapidly. One system measures changes in the movement and breathing of fish in order to provide an early warning of developing toxicity in the wastes of an industrial plant. The other system measures changes in the diversity of algal comunities in streams by means of laser holography. The incorporation and use of these systems in industrial plants is discussed.     

THE NEED FOR A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH IN THE MANAGEMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES1

ABSTRACT Environmental resources can be managed properly only by adopting a comprehensive approach. The whole environment must be considered as a single system, and prior to any action, all types of environmental impacts caused by it should be studied in detail. This paper underlines the close relationship between different environmental problems, analyzes existing management patterns, and proposes new alternatives whenever applicable. The different constraints, which have to be considered in the decision-making process while developing a plan, are also discussed. It is concluded that efforts neglecting the interaction among different aspects of the environment do not upgrade the quality of water, air, and land to any appreciable degree.     

ALTERNATIVE FUTURES USING THE WOLLMAN-BONEM MODELS1

Alternative futures are defined to be mutually consistent alternative combinations of assumed sets of future conditions. Alternative futures are employed in conjunction with the Wollman-Bonem model to project future water use. The model solutions under different alternative futures provide an indication of the direction and relative magnitude of changes in water use, both in quantity and quality, that may result from changes in policy-influenced variables, technology, and other data. The Wollman-Bonem model is employed in this paper as a tool to illustrate the alternative futures concept. The model can best be cast as an economic model. The model solutions are not given as a set of formal projections, but as various possible water-use-over-time curves. This should aid in disspelling the erroneous idea that it is possible to make distant projections of water use as a single curve. Multiple curves suggest that water use is really a function of many variables.     

APPLYING GRADIENT PROJECTION AND CONJUGATE GRADIENT TO THE OPTIMUM OPERATION OF RESERVOIRS1

The recent versions of nonlinear programming techniques such as the conjugate gradient and the gradient projection algorithms are used to obtain the optimal operating conditions of a multiple reservoirs system with multiple purposes. These algorithms are compared with other techniques in the literature. The conjugate gradient method incorporates the advantages of both the generalized Newton-Raphson, also known as the quasilinearization technique, and the gradient approach while avoiding their major drawbacks. To illustrate the technique, a water resources system with three reservoirs and a tabular objective function is solved by the two algorithms.