Abstract
Over the past decades, a number of water sciences and management programs have been developed to better understand and manage the water cycles at multiple temporal and spatial scales for various purposes, such as ecohydrology, global hydrology, sociohydrology, supply management, demand management, and integrated water resources management (IWRM). At the same time, rapid advancements have also been taking place in tracing, mapping, remote sensing, machine learning, and modelling technologies in hydrological research. Despite those programs and advancements, a water crisis is intensifying globally. The missing link is effective interactions between the hydrological research and water resource management to support implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at multiple spatial scales. Since the watershed is the natural unit for water resources management, watershed science offers the potential to bridge this missing link. This study first reviews the advances in hydrological research and water resources management, and then discusses issues and challenges facing the global water community. Subsequently, it describes the core components of watershed science: (1) hydrological analysis; (2) water-operation policies; (3) governance; (4) management and feedback. The framework takes into account water availability, water uses, and water quality; explicitly focuses on the storage, fluxes, and quality of the hydrological cycle; defines appropriate local water resource thresholds through incorporating the planetary boundary framework; and identifies specific actionable measures for water resources management. It provides a complementary approach to the existing water management programs in addressing the current global water crisis and achieving the UN SDGs.
Highlights
Over the past decades, different water resource management approaches have been developed to tackle the global water shortage and conflicts, such as supply management, demand management, and integrated water resources management (IWRM) (He et al, 2005, 2014, 2020)
The World Economic Forum has declared that we are facing a global water-supply crisis (The World Economic Forum, 2013; He et al, 2020). What causes this conundrum? Some scholars have stated global water crisis is a governance crisis (WWAP, 2006; Castro, 2007; Di Baldassarre et al, 2019) and that the absence of an institutional framework in both conventional and integrated water-resources planning and management approaches led to the failure of achieving sustainable water-resources management (Matondo, 2002)
Others cite a mismatch in scales between politics and watersheds and the absence of an institutional framework across multiple spatial scales that leads to the failure of achieving sustainable water resources management. They call for a better understanding of multiscale processes of human-environment interactions and implementation of participatory and adaptive management approaches in IWRM (Matondo, 2002; Blomquist and Schlager, 2005; Pahl-Wostl, 2007 ; He, 2012; He et al, 2005, 2010, 2020; Hering and Ingold, 2012; WWAP, 2006, 2019)
Summary
Different water resource management approaches have been developed to tackle the global water shortage and conflicts, such as supply management, demand management, and integrated water resources management (IWRM) (He et al, 2005, 2014, 2020). The World Economic Forum has declared that we are facing a global water-supply crisis (The World Economic Forum, 2013; He et al, 2020) Few have specified the mechanism of integrating water sciences and management at the watershed scale (Johnson et al, 2001; WWAP, 2006; Hering and Ingold, 2012; Cai et al, 2015; Cheng et al, 2014; Li et al, 2015; Garrick et al, 2017; Zipper et al, 2020). This study briefly reviews the evolution of water sciences and management, analyzes the missing links between water sciences and water management, at the watershed scale, and proposes a framework of watershed science (WS) to help achieve the UN SDGs
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