Realised by: Alina Druta and Olivia Manoli

Water resource management

Water resource management is the activity of planning, developing, distributing and managing the
optimum use of water resources. It is a sub-set of water cycle management. Ideally, water resource
management planning has regard to all the competing demands for water and seeks to allocate water
on an equitable basis to satisfy all uses and demands. As with other resource management, this is
rarely possible in practice.

Water is not only an essential resource in itself, but also of prime importance as transport agent (e.g. of
soil and nutrients), as a dissolver and carrier of materials and energy. Within the resources sections of
UNU-FLORES, Water Resources Management in particular considers these linkages and:

- Develops and coordinates the research programme of UNU-FLORES on water resources

management, considering the close inter-linkage with other environmental resources (soil,
waste);
- Describes and analyzes water cycles connecting different water compartments (precipitation,
rivers, lakes, groundwater, etc.);
- Describes and analyzes the linkages of water cycles with chemical or material cycles;
- Contributes to the formulation of management strategies for water resources at different scales
(e.g., urban water, at basin scale, etc.), considering various activities at those levels, such as
interactions with land-use, water-related ecosystem services etc.; and
- Analyses the effects of and contributes to sustainable management related to global change,
including local climate and extreme events (floods, droughts).
 Visualisation of the distribution (by volume) of water on Earth. Each tiny cube (such as the one representing
biological water) corresponds to approximately 1000 cubic km of water, with a mass of approximately 1 trillion
tonnes (2000 times that of the Great Pyramid of Giza or 5 times that of Lake Kariba, arguably the heaviest
man-made object). The entire block comprises 1 million tiny cubes.

Content:
1. Overview
2. Agriculture
3. Managing water in urban settings
4. Future of water resources
5. Projects & Operations
6. Results
7. Data(http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/waterresour
cesmanagement/research)
8. How to develop sustainable irrigation projects with
private sector participation
(http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/201
6/02/25912697/develop-sustainable-irrigation-
projects-private-sector-participation

Method: Statistical, Analytical.

http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/waterresourcesmanage
ment/projects
http://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2013/04/15/water-
resources-management-results-profile