Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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environmental sustainability - to protect the water resources base and
related aquatic ecosystems and more broadly to help address global
environmental issues (Jønch-Clausen and Fugl 2001).
To assess whether these objectives are met, tools to estimate benefits, risks and
impacts can be considered. They are commonly grouped into socio-economic
assessment and ecological (or environmental) assessment tools. Other tools
can also be applied: Strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats (SWOT),
Global Reporting Initiative for sustainability and governance, and multiple
criteria analysis (MCA). We consider these later in this chapter.
Sometimes a bottom line or minimum requirement must be considered.
The Australian National Water Initiative (Commonwealth of Australia 2004)
indicates that in making water resource plans, state and territory government
jurisdictions should optimise economic, social and environmental outcomes,
provided that extraction of water is within environmentally sustainable
levels (clauses 2 and 23). Applying such concepts on the ground has proved
challenging. Hamstead (2009: 1) comments:
The National Water Initiative requires the return of overallocated and
overused systems to environmentally sustainable levels of extraction (cl
23). While such terms as 'environmentally sustainable levels of extraction'
and 'overallocation' are defined in the NWI, each Australian jurisdiction
has different views on whether particular systems are overallocated or not
and has taken different approaches to determining the level of stress or
risk environmental values are exposed to when weighed against economic
impacts. For many parts of Australia, this manifests itself as the debate
about how much additional water can be taken from rivers or aquifers
without there being an unacceptable risk of environmental damage. For
water systems where extraction levels are already high and there is strong
evidence of environmental decline, modifying or reducing extraction to
halt environmental loss has proven to be one of the most difficult aspects
of Australia's water reforms.
Uncertainty about the future provides a particular challenge for assessing
and comparing management options. One might ask which will perform
best in a range of possible futures? For this reason we consider dealing with
uncertainty as a particular aspect of comparative assessment.
Defining social equity is often difficult, as it is highly dependent on the
perspective and perceptions of persons or groups. For example, which is more
important, economic benefits in a town or in a rural area? Achieving this kind
of objective is as much about process as it is about outcomes. In many cases
an overriding issue in decision-making, which is rarely explicit, is perception
of equity and fairness. Lack of equity provides fuel to conflict. From a
review of case studies around Australia, Hamstead
et al.
(2008) suggest
that significant unaddressed concerns of a particular stakeholder group are
