SEMINAR: Centre for Water Research Seminar
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Centre for Water Research Seminar : Water Resource Management: Connecting With Nature and Community |
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Historically water resource management has been concerned with water supply, sometimes waste water disposal and in some instances with flood control; in brief the domain of the civil and sanitary engineer. Then in the 1960's, water resource managers and planners had to include the concept of "environmental flows", a quantity that has still not been properly defined given that the river environment has evolved, over hundreds of years, using all the water that flowed down a river.
An analogous contraction is faced by water resource engineers when considering the construction of a new dam on a native river. The environmentalists usually object with the reason that the dam kills the river biodiversity. However, even a casual inspection reveals that lakes have a much higher biodiversity than that of an equivalent stretch of river; the objection is thus more about changing the status quo, than because of any loss of biodiversity.
Then, over the last twenty years, water resource managers have come to realise that the very core of their trade has changed; risk can no longer be assessed from an analysis of past statistics. Human intervention has gown to such a scale as to change the population statistics of their business. For instance, in the 1970's it was realised that land clearing leads to the water table to rise, causing wide spread water logging and salinisation. Further, I will show how land clearing also leads to a very definite reduction of rainfall. Recent research has also shown that green space leads to measurable benefits for human health. Lastly, lakes sequester very large quantities of carbon and if managed correctly can be used to produce fish, sequester carbon and provide recreational opportunities as well as fulfilling their original design objectives.
Clearly, water resource mangers, given the tools, could provide society with not only potable water, flood control and hydropower, but also make a community carbon neutral, rich in food and fish protein, high in biodiversity, stable in annual rainfall and provide benefits for people's health. When combined with new waste water treatment technologies that allow pathogens and synthetic organics to be removed from waste water without removing nutrients that can be used to fertilise terrestrial and aquatic primary production it becomes apparent that water resource managers are in the best position to become the providers of a sustainable life style. I will provide some quantitative background to these considerations and then show real-time adaptive management may be used to achieve a multi objective optimisation.
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