Integrated water resources management for an inland river basin in China

Abstract

There is a crucial need to achieve a more sustainable management of the world's water resources with serious water scarcity and water pollution. The trans-basin movement of water faces major environmental and engineering challenges and remains controversial. Therefore, improved management of water within basins offers more feasible options to enhance the efficiency of water use. This paper aimed to find out the bottlenecks of integrated catchment management, summarizes the research frontier about integrated catchment management and put forwards some measures, mainly include taking the interaction impacts among water, land and other factors into consideration, evaluating the effectiveness and impacts on different systems of decisions and policies based on appropriate methods, and strengthening watershed management capacity. This paper provides decision-making information for integrated catchment management. The government should strengthen the scientific research in the relationship between water sector and other sectors, and account trans-basin water resources flow. Moreover, participation of different stakeholders is one of key points to promote the success of integrated water resources management (IWRM). Much of the evidence in this paper is from the Heihe River Basin, which is the second largest inland river basin in China. While this evidence comes from a specific area, the integrated economic and environmental modeling presented in this paper can usefully be applied to river basin management elsewhere. Indeed, the international collaboration of researchers evident in this paper is a testament to the worldwide interest in freshwater management issues.