Water Resources Management - Practices of Irrigation and On-farm Water Management - page 188

5.6.2.5 Educate the People
The success of water resources development and conservation relies on the inhabi-
tants on the locality. The public should be aware of the impacts of climate change
on water resources. Water resources professionals should contribute by helping
governmental agencies to achieve their goals.
5.7 Challenges in Water Resources Management
5.7.1 Risk and Uncertainties
Water resource management is concerned with how the available and/or harvestable
supply of water can be better allocated to fulfill the required demand. Thus, the water
resource management measures involve a certain degree of uncertainties and risk
because both water supplies and demands have inherent components of randomness.
Some of the factors for this randomness can be attributed to the spatial and temporal
variability of supply and/or demand.
5.7.2 International/Intra-national (Upstream-Downstream) Issues
The critical factors affecting international water management problem are the tem-
poral characteristics associated with the objectives of the upstream and downstream
countries. In some cases, the intra-national, that is, for upstream and downstream
sides may face similar problems. Very often, the objectives of upstream and down-
stream sides differ from each other. For example, the objective of upstream country
is to maximize the production of hydro-electric power while the objective of down-
stream side is to maximize their utilization of water for irrigation. This situation
may lead to a major international conflict over the water.
5.7.3 Quality Degradation Due to Continuous Pumping
of Groundwater
Groundwater is not an independent entity but is only one of the phases in which
water exists in its overall hydrologic cycle. If the groundwater becomes contam-
inated (such as Arsenic contamination in West Bengal of India and Bangladesh),
it will be a catastrophic event, and troublesome to purify. Mining or overex-
ploitation of groundwater has already altered groundwater geochemistry possibly
contributing to high levels of arsenic and increasing concentrations of fluorides
(Serageldin, 1999). Environmental consequences of such exploitation may become
critical slowly in most cases. But the situation may be irreversible if care is not taken
beforehand.