Landscape Planning for Sustainable Water Usage

Excerpt

Extreme events such as floods, droughts, as well as water scarcity and poor water quality have been increasing globally during recent decades. Global change phenomena, increasing population density in some parts of the world, as well as multiple land use of landscapes such as agricultural management, urbanization, and industrialization are some of the main reasons for these problems. Both the mentioned reasons as well as the resulting environmental consequences, represent some of the world’s most pressing problems that occur on different scales – from the field to the region or even globally. In recent decades, integrated river basin and environmental management – including landscape planning – have been introduced as a potential but challenging instrument to tackle these complex transdisciplinary problems around the world. However, several problems still exist before an effective integrated planning and management can be realized. This section introduces these problems and presents contributions to the solution for some of these (methodological but also environmental) problems. In the following, the existing problems and needs of the handled topics are briefly argued, and numerous studies on the solutions to these problems are shortly illustrated. In the sense of an integrated methodology, promising developments of decision-support systems are presented as one future direction to support sustainable land use planning and water resources management. Finally, criteria for sustainable water planning are presented. …