Integrated and Participatory Water Resources Management: Practice

About this book

A participatory and integrated procedure for the planning of water resources is presented and illustrated through its application to a real-world case study: the planning of a trans-boundary, multi-purpose, regulated lake. Methods and concepts from Hydrology, System Analysis, Optimal Control, Decision and Negotiation Theory are presented and framed in a comprehensive and coherent procedure for the efficient development of the decision-making process. Relevant theoretical and mathematical aspects are briefly presented for the non-expert reader, as well as all those practical details that are often omitted in texts, but that constitute the very essence of a project and make the difference between a successful project and a failure. The book provides practicing professionals, decision-makers and scientists with a complete, immediate example of application of the Integrated Water Resource Management paradigm.

Contents

1. Making Decisions: a Difficult Problem. A. Setting the Verbano Project. 2. Reconnaissance: Territory, Stakeholders and Regulation. 3. The Options for Interventions. 4. Criteria and Indicators. 5. Defining Actions and Formulating the Design Problem. 6. Identifying the Model. 7. The Control Problem. 8. Estimating the Effects. 9. Evaluation. 10. Comparison. B. Identifying the Reasonable Alternatives. 11. Designing Alternatives and Evaluation. 12. Comparison: the First Negotiation Step. 13. Comparison: the Second Negotiations Step. 14. Mitigation Measures. C. The Final Decision. 15. Summary of the Project. 16. The Final Decision. 17. Implementation. Bibliography. Index.

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Biography

Rodolfo Soncini-Sessa received his PhD on System Analysis at Politecnico di Milano, Italy in 1972; he was with the Water Group of the International Institute for System Analysis (IIASA) several times since 1975 and thought Water Management in some Italian Universities before being full professor of Natural Resources Management at the Politecnico di Milano. He is chair of the IFAC TC on Modelling & Control of Environmental Systems, and in the Editorial Boards of Water International and Journal of Environmental Modelling and Software. His main research interests are in the design of DSS for participatory decision making in the area of water resources.