What is Integrated Water Resource Management?

The days of Water Resource Management strategy focused on the quantitative aspects of water supply logistics are over.

Equally, Water Resource Management focused on mitigating and slowing down the inevitable outcome of such flawed strategy with palliative mitigation measures is tantamount to sabotage. A slow-motion train crash, is still a train crash.

Continuing to manage water resources by extending the water logistics network to supply high density usage areas under the current paradigm is self-defeating. It degrades water quality and impedes reusability. Effective solutions can only be found by improving the reusability of water through the adoption of the Renewable Water paradigm.

Despite our best intentions, much of our legacy infrastructure has become a liability and it is only by adopting Integrated Water Resource Management incorporating new science and technology that we can turn it back into an asset.

Integrated Water Resource Management strategy for tomorrow must integrate the legacy infrastructure, technology and problems of the past with new solutions of the future.

So Integrated Water Resource Management is a more sophisticated approach to water resource management that

  • recognizes the need for integration of Newtonian Science with Systems Theory, engineering with biotechnology and the science of inanimate objects with the science of living systems or biomes
  • integrates legacy strategy, infrastructure and engineering technology which manages the quantity domain with Biotechnology in order to manage the quality domain
  • transitions from a linear supply chain model focused on water quantity to a circular economy model based on the Water Cycle and managing water quality for reuse
  • maximizes the efficiency of the Water Cycle because this translates into maximizing recycling and reuse to deliver an effective increase in available water supply.

Integrated Water Resource Management is therefore only worthy of the name if it clearly articulates a pathway that leads to the Renewable Water paradigm.

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