Measurements Beyond River Health: Water Sustainability Assessment and River Sustainability Index
Water is one of our most critical resources: as populations and economies grow,water scarcity and degradation pose a growing threat to socio-economic development and environment protection.It has become more challenging but critical to provide adequate freshwater for the competing needs of human use,whilst at the same time managing the associated Long-term consequences and risks in the environment.The maintenance and restoration of healthy river systems have become important objectives of environment and water resources management.Integrated assessment is needed in order to understand these challenges and to manage water towards a sustainable future.Tools for river health assessment have been developed to measure the ecological status and natural capital of the river courses.Extending river health measurements to include socioeconomic values imbedded in water resources,this paper presents an indicator-based framework for assessing river sustainability.We discuss how sustainability indicators are applied to assess the specific concerns of water sustainability.In this paper we introduce our approach using the Process Analysis Method of sustainability assessment,which leads to a Composite River Sustainability Index for the Lower Yellow River in China.This methodology presents a systematic way to incorporate all domains of sustainability,and to generate a tailored indicator set.The paper concludes that a sustainability indicator framework provides a transparent and participatory basis for assessing river sustainability.Such assessments provide the information and overview that are needed for identifying critical issues,and are especially helpful in underpinning policy devdopment.
sustainable assessment sustainability index river health measurements
Wu Huijuan Richard C.Darton Alistair G.L.Borthwick Ni Jinren
Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Parks Road,Oxford, OX1 3PJ, United Kingdom Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University College Cork, Ireland Department of Environmental Engineering, Peking University, The Key Laboratory of Water and Sediment
国际会议
The 5th International Yellow River Forum (第五届黄河国际论坛)
郑州
英文
262-272
2012-09-24（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）