Version 1
: Received: 2 January 2024 / Approved: 3 January 2024 / Online: 3 January 2024 (09:21:51 CET)
How to cite:
Grigg, N. Water Resources Sustainability: Assessment, Integrated Management, and Public Communication. Preprints2024, 2024010186. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202401.0186.v1
Grigg, N. Water Resources Sustainability: Assessment, Integrated Management, and Public Communication. Preprints 2024, 2024010186. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202401.0186.v1
Grigg, N. Water Resources Sustainability: Assessment, Integrated Management, and Public Communication. Preprints2024, 2024010186. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202401.0186.v1
APA Style
Grigg, N. (2024). Water Resources Sustainability: Assessment, Integrated Management, and Public Communication. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202401.0186.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Grigg, N. 2024 "Water Resources Sustainability: Assessment, Integrated Management, and Public Communication" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202401.0186.v1
Abstract
Achieving sustainable development will require improved water management, but the main framework to address it, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), lacks clarity and acceptance among a diverse community of many stakeholders. This creates communication problems and obscures issues that people care about like drinking water and pollution prevention. As a process within IWRM, the concept of water resources assessment also suffers from a lack of clarity, which leads to ambiguity and reports that are too general to lead to action. This lack of acceptance of IWRM and water resources assessment saps support for essential data collection, analysis, and reporting. Clarifying IWRM will require work within the water community and better messaging to stakeholders. Methods for water resources assessment can be clarified by linking outcomes to higher level reporting of policy and issues. Acceptance of the role of water resources assessment can be facilitated by adding it to the management instruments in the IWRM Toolbox. Stovepipes among water management agencies require coordination to achieve this, usually through framework studies. Improved messaging will involve what people and stakeholders care about and will require changed approaches to presentation of outcomes by categories, such as drinking water, pollution prevention, and flood risk reduction. Researchers can report outcomes with technical messaging that trends toward uniform language and definitions and the water resources management community can nudge its media outlets to carry unifying messages.
Keywords
Water resources assessment; IWRM; Public communication; Policy; Planning; SDGs
Subject
Engineering, Civil Engineering
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
