Integrated catchment management: path to enlightenment

Abstract

In July 2010, our two Centres delivered an international summer schoolon integrated catchment management. Thirty delegates with a varietyof disciplinary backgrounds and experiences in the UK, China, Canada,Sweden and South Africa spent 6 days discussing cases studies, issuesand approaches before taking a field trip around some of the watermanagement issues of the Beijing area. The international delegates andChinese instructors then continued to Lanzhou as guests of CAREERI(Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering ResearchInstitute) for field visits and discussions about the Heihe River Basin.In this paper, we present a very simplified and generalized historyof water and catchment management. This is used to show that all theservices we obtain from water and catchments are closely interlinkedalthough they have often been treated separately. With the intensepressures arising from population growth and rising standards of living,integrated management of land, water and society is the only waywe will be able to live sustainably with the land and water resourcesavailable, whether in China, the UK or elsewhere in the world. We endby discussing the path to enlightenment, more specifically, how societiescan reassemble the jigsaw of fragmented ecosystem services and achieveintegrated catchment management.