Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
irrigation, industry, stock) on the one hand, against the benefits of leaving
water in the water resource to maintain ecosystems and provide other benefits.
It also considers the benefits associated with altering natural flow patterns
(e.g. capturing high wet season flows and releasing them in drier times)
in comparison to the need to retain sufficient natural patterns to support
ecosystems. It entails planning how surface and underground water resources
will be managed and shared to achieve environmental, economic and social
outcomes. It is usually guided by the principles such as 'sustainable use' (refer
to chapter 2), though what these mean in practice is frequently the subject of
considerable debate. It is in the end what the local and broader community
(extending to the global community) are willing to accept.
This agreed position is not determined solely by scientific assessments,
though it is informed by them. It requires a process that involves judgements
to be made on trade-offs between competing objectives and consideration of
risk and uncertainty. How well this process is done determines how well the
plan results in outcomes attuned to community needs and values in the short
and long term.
Regardless of scale, water resource planning can be broken down into
generic planning steps. These steps are described in a variety of different
ways in different circumstances in the literature, but the underlying intent is
common. For the purposes of this topic, we label the planning steps with the
general descriptive terms illustrated in Figure 3.1.
Figure 3.1
Steps of planning process
