Sustainable Management of

Water Resources
Water Resources Planning and
Management
 Integrative Nature of River Basins
• River basins don’t respect political
boundaries
– Integrate and accumulate effects of
Environmental
• Economic, social, & environmental systems Policy

• Water management
– Decisions should

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en
• Reflect and adapt to integrative nature

In
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s
tru

tit
– Environment should be

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io
ti

na
• Enabling

en

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Enabling

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ol
• Based on clear policies, legislation, regulations, Environment

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es
an
& information

M
– Institutions Economic Social
• Administrative bodies and stakeholders Policy Policy
• Need well defined roles & responsibilities
– Instruments
• Regulation, monitoring, & enforcement
• Environmental, social, & economic policies
 Policies Affected by Integration
• Sustainable development entails
– Security & preservation of natural environment
• Environmental Policies
– Limit spatial & temporal externalities
Environmental
• Social Policies Policy

– Access to water
• Sufficiency, safety, affordability & accessibility

ts
• Social, cultural, and economic good

en

In
m
– Democratic governance

s
tru

tit
ut
ns
• Information enables participation

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• Basis for sustainable management Enabling

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ol
Environment

ag

e
• Economic Policies

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an
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– Incentives & cost allocation
– Subsidies Economic Social
Policy Policy
• Food security and agricultural subsidies
• Distort water use efficiency
 What can go wrong?

Syr Darya

Amu Darya

The Aral Sea Region

 THE ARAL SEA
1850’s
1950’s

Not much change over 100

years, but then …
 Irrigation Development & the Aral Sea
80 8
Area Land
(103 km2) (106 ha)
70 7
Flow
Irrigated
60 Land 6
(km3)
50 Area 5

40 4

30 3
Flow
20 2

10 1

0 0
1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
 1973
1976
1985
1989
1997
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
“I created the problems of the Aral Sea and
Only I can solve them.”

Rim A. Giniyatullin
Former Water Minister of Uzbekistan
 Aral Sea - Losses

 12 x maximum permitted DDT

 3/4 of people suffer from illness
 70 % of fishermen are pre-cancerous
 5 x death rate of former Soviet republics
Aral Sea Basin – Unsustainable Agriculture
Nadjinski Kazalinsk
S a lt C o n c e n t r a t io n ( g /l)

2.00

1.50
Salinity Increase

1.00

0.50

0.00 Kyrgyzsstan Uzebekistan Kazakhstan

50/55 55/60 60/65 65/70 70/75 75/80 80/85 85/90
4.0

2.0

Yield growth rate (%)

Crop Yield Reduction
0.0
1961-70 1970-80 1980-88 1988-1994
Regional cooperation and moves toward -2.0
efficient water use are keys to recovering
from loss of livelihoods, mass migration, -4.0
rampant pollution, and ecosystem damage
resulting from unsustainable irrigation -6.0
practices…
- UN Development Program 2009 -8.0
 Sustainable Water Resources
Management
Water resource systems that are designed
and managed to fully contribute to the
needs of society, now and in the indefinite
future, while protecting their cultural,
ecological and hydrological integrity.

• ASCE sustainable water management workshop,

1997
 Sustainability: Principle to Practice
• Broad guidance is available
• Difficult to translate guidance into operational
concepts applied to specific systems
• Requires
– Basin approach
– Considering externalities and economic efficiency
– Scaling up of processes
– Multidisciplinary approach with stakeholder input
– Consideration of current vs. future costs and benefits
Example - SYR DARYA BASIN
Reservoir River River
inflow Reservoir inflow
Side
Inflow
Kyrgyzstan
Side Inflow
Uzbekistan
Side Offstream
Inflow Use

Offstream
Use
Reservoir
River
inflow
Reservoir Side Tajikistan
Offstream Inflow
Use

Side
Inflow Offstream
Use
Offstream
Use Uzbekistan
Kazakhstan Lake

Storage Reservoir

Hydropower Plant (HPP) Side

Inflow
Main River Inflow
Offstream
Small River or Side Inflow Use

Diversion and return flow

User

Estuary and Sea

 Example - Rio Grande/Bravo
• Ag. Sector
• Mexico
– 10 Irr. Districts
– 25 Uderales
– 3138 MCM/yr
• US
– 35 Irr. Districts
– 3369 MCM/yr
• Municipal Sector
• Mexico
– 11 cities
– 421 MCM/yr
• US
– 14 cities
– 359 MCM/yr
• Reservoirs
• International
– 2 (7.18 BCM)
• Mexico
– 15 (11.4 BCM)
• US
– 6 (3.43 BCM)
Egypt, located in a belt of extreme aridity, is nearly
completely dependent on the River Nile (Figure
1.15) for its water resources.

- Egypt’s population density is among the highest

in the world: of its population of 63 million in
2000, 97% lives on 5% of land in the small strip
along the Nile and in the Delta where water is
abundant.
- To relieve the population pressure in the Nile
Delta and Nile Valley, the government has
embarked on an ambitious programme to
increase the inhabited area in Egypt from the
present 5% to about 25% in the future.
- New industrial areas areplanned in the desert, to be supplied by
Nile water
- However, the availability of Nile water remains the same. Under
the present agreement with Sudan, Egypt is allowed to use 55.5
billion m3 of Nile water each year.
- That water is nearly completely used already and a further
increase in demand will result in a lower availability of water per
hectare.
Additional measures can and will be taken to increase the
efficiency of water use in Egypt, but that will not be sufficient
- Egypt is looking into possibilities to increase the supply by taking
measures upstream in Sudan and Ethiopia
- Cooperation with the other (nine) countries in the Nile basin is
essential to enable those developments
 Multidisciplinary Adaptive Process
• Multidisciplinary
– Physical relationships
• Yield vs. water quantity and quality
• Water use efficiency vs. Infrastructure
– Socio-economic relationships
• Water availability & demand vs. Economic incentives &
investments
• Socio-economic benefits vs. ecological water uses
• Adaptive - Current vs Future
– Satisfy immediate demands without compromising
future
– Short-term decisions often lead to
• Resource depletion which could be used in future
• Long-term, accumulative, negative impacts
 Water Resource Systems Analysis
• Water resources problems are
– Complex, interconnected, and overlapping
– Involving water allocations, economic development, and
environmental preservation
• Systems analysis
– Break complex system down into components and analyze the
interactions between the components
– Central method used in water resources planning
 System Representation
Some Systems in WRPM:
Parameters, b Watershed
Aquifer
Development Area
Detention Basin
Transformation function
Inputs, I Outputs, Q
Q(t) = W(a, b) * I(t)

• Mathematical model
Policies or controls, a • Transform Inputs into Outputs
• Typically a set of algebraic equations
• Derived from differential equations of
System Characteristics
– Conservation of Mass (e.g., continuity)
Linear Nonlinear
– Conservation of Momentum (e.g., Manning)
Lumped Distributed
– Conservation of Energy (e.g., friction loss)
Steady-state Transient
Deterministic Stochastic
 Conceptual Model

An example of a conceptual model without detail (i.e., what exactly each

component represents), showing the links representing interactions among
components and between management decisions and specific system impacts.
Conceptual Model of a River Basin
Precipitation Runoff Other Sources

Downstream
River Reaches & Reservoirs Requirements
Instream Uses

Evapotranspiration
Consumptive Distribution
Use System
Precipitation

Municipal & Agricultural

Industrial Treatment Demand Sites
Demand Sites

Groundwater
Pumping Drainage
Collection,
Treatment,
& Disposal
Precipitation

Aquifer
 Modeling Process
Problem identification
and description
• Problem identification
– Important elements to be modeled Model
Data
– Relations and interactions between them conceptualization
– Degree of accuracy
• Conceptualization and development Model
development
– Mathematical description
– Type of model
– Numerical method - computer code Model calibration &
parameter estimation
– Grid, boundary & initial conditions
• Calibration
– Estimate model parameters Model verification &
sensitivity analysis
– Model outputs compared with actual outputs
– Parameters adjusted until the values agree
• Verification Model Documentation
– Independent set of input data used
– Results compared with measured outputs
Model application

Present results
 River Basin Management
Precipitation, Temperature, Humidity, Streamflow
Infrastructure control, Institutional
Water Quality, Groundwater, Snow pack,
policies & incentives
Evapotranspiration
Warnings, Alarms

Decision Data
Implementation Measurement

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Processing &
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Decision Making Archiving

Analysis

Data base
MCDM Data model
Operating rules Data display
Expert system
Rainfall/runoff,
Optimization, Warnings
Flooding, Hydraulics, Water Allocation,
Risk management, Dispute Resolution
Water Pollution, Environmental Flows
 Example
• Design a minimum cost water storage tank to hold a specific volume of
water, say V 
• Decision variables (unknown)
– length, L
– width, W (unknown) H
– height, H (unknown) V
•  Objective
– minimize total tank cost W
L
– by choosing L, W, and H
• Cost = sum of the costs of the base, sides top
• Model parameters (known)
– volume V
– Costs per unit area of the base, sides and top Cbase, Cside and Ctop
 Model & Solution
• Minimize Cost
Subject to:
Cost = (Cbase + Ctop)(LW) + 2(Cside) (LH + WH)
LWH ≥ V
• Solution
W = L = [2Cside V/(Cbase + Ctop)]1/3
H= V/ [2Cside V/(Cbase + Ctop)]2/3
H = V1/3[(Cbase + Ctop)/2Cside]2/3
•  Result = a design - one of many that could be proposed.
Others could be:
– cylindrical tank having a radius and height as decision-variables.
– truncated cone, having different bottom and top radii and the height as
decision-variables.
 Example
• Allocate reservoir release Rt to 3 users and provide instream flow Qt

storage St
release Rt
inflow It

Operating Policy Allocation Policy

Optimization
• Benefit

• Decision variables

• Objective:

• Constraints:

Optimization model
Simulation
Operating Policy

Allocation Policy
 Simulation vs Optimization
• Simulation models: Predict response to given design
• Optimization models: Identify optimal designs or policies