Integrated Water Resources Management

Addressing the issues identified above and meeting the USAID's Strategic Objective (SO 1) of Increased and improved Protection and Sustainable Use of Natural Resources requires a broad array of tools. They can range from satellite imagery and global information systems, to web sites, social marketing, and collection of gender-specific indigenous knowledge. Determining the appropriate tool and adapting it to the scale, environment, and situation is a capability possessed by the ME&A Team as a consequence of long-standing experience working in IWRM.

There are four overarching issues we believe likely to be among the most significant that USAID will be asked to address in the coming decade. We understand that the issues in this sector are often inter-related and multi-faceted and that an approach or specific tools or methods that worked in one situation will not necessarily work in another without modification. The ME&A Team has the expertise to analyze complex situations and adjust approaches, tools, and methods to the real world.

Water pollution . Water pollution from industrial, urban, and rural sources negatively impacts both ground and surface water quality. Pollutants range from increased fecal coliform in drinking water resulting from inadequate or non-existent treatment of sewage, to increased nitrites and pesticides in surface and ground water from agricultural run-off, to increased levels of persistent organic pollutants from poor or non-existent treatment of industrial wastewaters. The pollution impacts people at all levels of society, from the household to the national and international level. Being able to detect these pollutants and then develop institutional and technological solutions dealing with them are of increasing importance .

Equally important are legacy issues from long-standing operations. Examples of such legacy water pollution problems include industrial pollution of aquifers in Thailand and Eastern Europe, and increased arsenic in groundwater in Bangladesh . Thailand has recently begun detecting organic pollutants in groundwater that are associated with their burgeoning electronics industry. The Bangladesh arsenic problem is related to continued over-pumping of groundwater resources to provide freshwater and irrigation for rice. The problem is virtually pandemic in the country and beginning to have significant health effects. Groundwater problems that are a legacy of 50 years of Soviet industrial policy are also well known in every state that was a part of the former Soviet Union . All of these problems impact human health and the environment in many significant ways and require solutions that encompass changes in policies and institutions in addition to technology.

Competing demands for water resources. Water is a resource that is central to our lives. As such, there are a variety of competing demands from various types of users. Due to the direct and strong impact of water use on the structure of family, social, and commercial life, understanding both men's and women's role in productive and consumptive water activities is an essential step in designing effective programs to achieve water management objectives. Experience now demonstrates that ensuring both women's and men's participation in decision-making regarding the use of water at the local and political level is necessary to ensure equitable and efficient use of water resources. The Third World Water Forum indicated that water resources are vanishing at a higher rate than any time in history. As agriculture increases to meet demands of burgeoning populations it removes an ever-increasing volume from ground- and surface-water resources. As developing and transition countries move from agrarian to agro-industrial economies, their use of water to meet the requirements of these industries also increases. On the upstream end, water is removed from the environment impacting availability. On the downstream end, effluents from these operations impact water quality. There is a need to effectively manage these withdrawals and effluents and their impacts on water quality and quantity.

Watershed deforestation can destroy groundwater recharge capacity and the ability to ameliorate flooding as in Romania . Burgeoning refugee camps from Pakistan to Sudan put almost impossible burdens on drinking water. Another example of competing demands is the diversion of water for irrigation. When the Soviet Union decided to use the Aral Sea as an irrigation source for cotton in the 1960's, no thought was apparently given to the potential effects. Now 40 years later, the area is the locus of an ecological disaster. The sea has retreated to less than half its 1960's size and many towns and cities that bordered it have disappeared. In addition, drinking water around the sea is at a premium throughout the area and many once-important fisheries are now defunct.

Responsible water management. As countries have come to realize that water is not inexhaustible, they are developing policies and implementing laws to equitably share this resource. In some cases, national water utilities are beginning to recover the true cost of providing water while in turn tracking down system-wide losses. In doing this, the utilities have come to realize that their infrastructure, management, operations, and indeed their client communication, are often deficient. There are also instances where countries are no longer turning a blind eye to illegal clear-cutting now that they understand that such practices have much wider-ranging impacts. These impacts include loss of the ability to recharge aquifers, increased flooding and less overall water availability. Institutional, technical, and social solutions are needed to address these issues.

In Romania, a small county water utility determined that they were losing as much as 50 percent of their water from leaky infrastructure. They were able to get assistance in tracking down the leaks and found significant savings in operating costs as a result. They requested assistance from USAID to both develop an outreach program that let them explain the importance of water conservation and to pay water bills. These programs were so successful that the utility companies made them permanent parts of their organizations. Similarly, a recent USAID-funded project in Croatia for the City of Drnis by Booz Allen found that water loss for the municipal water utility was as high as 67.5 percent. Under the USAID Regional Infrastructure Program, assistance was provided to procure and install leakage detection equipment.

Trans-boundary water management. Some analysts claim that the major wars of the 21 st Century will be fought not over land but over water. Rivers, lakes, aquifers, seas, and oceans are no respecters of political boundaries and the issues associated with equitably managing their resources are manifold. These issues can be broken down into the quantity of water taken from freshwater resources that run from one country to another, the quality of water flowing from one country to another, and the food resources taken by one country at the loss of another. These disputes also can pit one village or province against another. While good models exist for dealing with international border and trade disputes, the same cannot be said for dealing with disputes regarding water resources. Effective modes of discourse and models of management are being developed for both trans-boundary and internal IWRM.

Trans-boundary water management affects relations between several CAR countries trying to manage the Abu Darya and Syr Darya river systems and India and Bangladesh, which have continuing tensions. The countries of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have begun to work together to develop a basin-wide implementation plan. Similarly, in the Sava River Basin, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia are working together to establish an organization to better manage the water resources of the Sava . These countries realize that working together will facilitate easing tensions between them.

Increasing and Improving Natural Resources

Integrated Water Resources Management

AREAS OF EXPERTISE