From Catchment Management to Managing River Basins

From Catchment Management to Managing River Basins: Science, Technology Choices, Institutions and Policy synthesizes key scientific facts that are crucial for catchment assessment and planning, and river basin water accounting, from extensive reviews of international literature on catchment hydrology, forest hydrology and other hydrological processes such as groundwater-surface water interactions. It discusses not only the science of catchment assessment and planning, but also the catchment planning process. It documents several of the positive international experiences with integrated catchment management and integrated basin management and distils the key learning from them, which are important from the point of view of shaping water management paradigms for the developing world. It presents detailed case studies from India and other parts of South Asia with integrated watershed/catchment management, and illustrate how lack of scientific planning lead to a myriad of un-intended consequences. It then presents pilot studies on integrated catchment management planning, and basin water accounting to show what kind of interventions would be required in the basins of those specific regions for enhancing that the social, economic and environmental outcomes of ICM and integrated water resources management.

From Catchment Management to Managing River Basins: Science, Technology Choices, Institutions and Policy discusses the theoretical and operational aspects of integrated catchment management and integrated water management in river basins, through reviews of international best practices and case studies. While there are a set of concepts and principles in IWRM that are widely known, there is lack of clarity on what practices (both physical and institutional) work for achieving its goals in different situations.

• Discusses theoretical nuances of scale effects in hydrology and land-use hydrology interactions, and demonstrate these phenomena by applying hydrological simulation models for real catchments
• Focuses on managing water in a situation in which water has become scarce
• Provides a theoretical discussion on water accounting procedures, followed by application of methodology and tools in real-life case studies in two river basins of India
• Presents applications of the concept of integrated water resources management for developing a WRM plan for an Indian river basin