Modelling and control for participatory planning and managing water systems

In many parts of the world, water demand is increasing while, at the same time, the availability and quality of water resources are decreasing, mainly due to human activities in connection with the growing world population, ongoing urbanization, industrialization and the intensification of agriculture. This development is often associated with general reductions in environmental quality and it endangers sustainable development. Integrated approaches are urgently required to identify and analyze such unfavourable and undesired developments and so allow for sustainable systems to be designed that integrate human society within its natural environment, for the benefit of both. It is generally agreed that Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) plays a crucial role in this context and that a participatory approach would help to better control and accelerate the integration, make the decision process more transparent and comparable across various river basins and scales, and increase confidence in an integrated, model-based, planning process. Notwithstanding the popularity raised by the IWRM paradigm in the last decade, there are still only a few applications in the real world, thus engendering a growing scepticism about the real potential of this attractive approach.