Major Challenges for Sustainable Water Management: A Review

Abstract

Water is a precious resource vital for all forms of life. It is ample in nature but has significant temporal and spatial variability. With increasing population, the per capita share of water on earth is decreasing, and in some regions it has reached at very low levels and where communities face water stress and water scarcity. While lack of safe drinking water is a major problem for close to a billion populaces of the earth, too much water also bring about misery, agony and destruction to many people, places and infrastructure. Optimal management and use of the available water in the 21st century needs a paradigm shift to a holistic approach since all aspects of water as well as social and economic infrastructures of the world are now more interdependent than ever before. Handling with water problems in the 21st century hence poses many challenges to water managers. Drinking water security, food security, energy security, climate change, water-related disaster management and maintaining acceptable environmental quality in a sustainable manner are among the major challenges at present and in the predictable future.

Sustainable water management (SWM) needs transfer between rival water sector needs and balancing the financial and social resources required to support necessary water systems. Water resources in specific accept growing attention given its rough distribution in many parts of the world. Various Engineering solutions are used to speech water management tasks played important roles in the past in areas such as entrée to clean water and sanitation, providing water for irrigation, offering protection against floods and power generation.

Keywords: sustainable water management, infrastructure, resource, climate change, environmental security,

Cite this Article Abhiram Mishra. Major Challenges for Sustainable Water Management: A Review. Journal of Water Resource Engineering and Management. 2017; 4(3): 23–27p