River Basin Management: What do we Really Want?

River basin management, or Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), is subject to the European Directive 2000/60/EC, related Directives and amendments (2008/105/EC). These Directives define management “objectives” such as: preventing and reducing pollution; promoting sustainable water usage; environmental protection; improving aquatic ecosystems and mitigating the effects of floods and droughts. The dominant objective is to achieve “good ecological and chemical status” for all Community waters by 2015. These are all noble and laudable goals, hard to disagree with, but they do not necessarily cover everything that “stakeholders” in water resources management (which is more or less everybody) really want. I claim that what we really want is to maximize net benefit from the operation and use of any water resources system, get as close to some “Utopia” as possible. Net benefit here is not meant in any narrow economic, monetary sense, but as a measure of all the goods and benefits, countable monetary but also qualitative, perceived, spiritual, whatever is “worth” anything to us. Utopia is the (theoretical) state of a system that combines all the “best values” achievable for all criteria considered. Implementation of this view revolves around the simple concept of mass conservation, dynamic water budget modelling, that tells us how much water is or will be available where and when. The model describes the dynamic balance of demand and supply, reliability of supply, various efficiencies etc. together with water quality, and whatever “valued” attribute of the system the model can describe. This yields the metric for the degree to which various objectives are met. A multi-attribute approach measures how close we can get to Utopia in a “normalized” achievement space of any number of criteria. The optimization tries to find the set of policies, measures, and technologies with their costs and efficiencies, that will get us as close to Utopia as possible. This involves trade-off between objectives (and stakeholders), give and take, that should lead to cooperative games that should in turn (given reasonable stakeholders) result in win-win solutions. This assumes that “to win” in some tangible sense, to be better off than “before”, is what we really want, and that we can learn and agree on what means: “better”.