Topic 3.2: Ensuring adequate water resources and storage infrastructure to meet agricultural, energy and urban needs
Ensuring adequate water resources is important for development and even more so considering the effects of increasing climate variability. This demands adequate storage and infrastructure, both natural and man-made. How can the middle ground be found among many different perspectives on how to protect those resources and their ecosystems, while sufficiently meeting human needs in a sustainable way?
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Topic 3.3: Preserving Natural Ecosystems
For their preservation and for human well-being, natural ecosystems and environmental flows need to become an integral part of land and water management planning, decision-making and implementation processes. What role can existing international laws and conventions play? What can be done in national and local level planning processes to take human needs, as well as local values and conditions into account?
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Topic 3.4: Managing and protecting surface, ground and rainwater
Rainfall is the largest water resource available but its management is the least developed. Groundwater is the most reliable resource but also the most vulnerable to pollution and over exploitation. Despite these facts institutional inertia encourages water management to remain focused on surface water. To protect these different water resources and freshwater eco-systems and to utilise them to their maximum potential in a responsible way, an integrated planning and management approach of surface, ground, soil and rainwater is advocated. What adaptation of legal and institutional frameworks would be required and how can science best inform politicians?
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