Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Understanding ‘water’
- Part II Water resources planning and management
- 8 Water law and the search for sustainability: a comparative analysis
- 9 Tackling the global water crisis: unlocking international law as fundamental to the peaceful management of the world's shared transboundary waters – introducing the H2O paradigm
- 10 Risk and uncertainty in water resources planning and management: a basic introduction
- 11 Collaboration and stakeholder engagement
- 12 Capacity building and knowledge sharing
- 13 Adaptive and integrated management of water resources
- 14 Gender and integrated water resource management
- 15 Environmental flows: achieving ecological outcomes in variable environments
- Part III Water resources planning and management: case studies
- Contributors
- Index
- References
8 - Water law and the search for sustainability: a comparative analysis
from Part II - Water resources planning and management
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Understanding ‘water’
- Part II Water resources planning and management
- 8 Water law and the search for sustainability: a comparative analysis
- 9 Tackling the global water crisis: unlocking international law as fundamental to the peaceful management of the world's shared transboundary waters – introducing the H2O paradigm
- 10 Risk and uncertainty in water resources planning and management: a basic introduction
- 11 Collaboration and stakeholder engagement
- 12 Capacity building and knowledge sharing
- 13 Adaptive and integrated management of water resources
- 14 Gender and integrated water resource management
- 15 Environmental flows: achieving ecological outcomes in variable environments
- Part III Water resources planning and management: case studies
- Contributors
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
Domestic water law regimes all around the globe face a common challenge: how to allocate freshwater resources in a fair, efficient, and sustainable manner. Agriculture, industry, and municipalities have traditionally competed for this increasingly limited resource. The legal structures that were devised to meet those critical economic and social uses, however, ignored another use, a non-consumptive use that until recently was not well understood and had relatively few champions in the political or legal arena. The environment – including adequate stream flows and healthy ecological processes – is the use that our domestic water law regimes have typically overlooked; the reason is that these legal systems were designed, in large measure, to regard water as a commodity for exclusive human use and consumption.
As a result of this myopic approach to the use of a natural resource, many rivers and streams bear little resemblance today to the waters they once were. Agricultural interests, industry, municipalities and other water managers have manipulated and degraded our freshwater resources in relentless fashion, all facilitated by domestic water law regimes. Meanwhile, little or no attention was paid to the adverse environmental effect of reduced stream flows or to the value of the ecological services that well-functioning freshwater systems provide.
After so many years and the creation of so many economic and social expectations predicated upon prior practice, change is difficult. Many waters are over-appropriated or otherwise impaired by excessive or unwise water uses.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Water Resources Planning and Management , pp. 155 - 174Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
References
- 1
- Cited by