Urgency of the research. Saving water is the biggest problem of modern humanity. The water quality generates quality of life and health of everyone. Thus, there is a need to analyse water condition, to find the ways of effective water management and implement the measures for sustainable environmental management. Target setting. Today water is extremely exposed to pollution, furthermore, issues around effective use of water resources are the number one problem worldwide. Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. A number of well-known Ukrainian scientists R. H. Dubas, A. V. Yatsyk, L. H. Melnyk, O. I. Karintseva, S. M. Shevchenko, M. A. Khvesyk, Y. M. Hryshchenko, as well as other researchers conducted investigations on salient and emerging trends in water resources' attraction into economic turnover. Uninvestigated parts of general matters defining. The research objective. Water use in different sectors of economy still faces a number of issues which have to be rganized, investigated and resolved. The purpose of this study is to establish guidelines of effective water use in line with sustainable development and environmental management principles by identifying salient trends of water use in modern Ukraine, as well as to reveal its issues in order to determine the ways to overcome existing deficiencies. The statement of basic materials. In our study, we consider the impact of water use on the actual water bodies to be the most important criterion in the classification of water consumption. The impact may be focused on quantitative or qualitative characteristics of water bodies, or on none of them. The level of qualitative changes in water use is pretty high. Attraction of water resources to the economy should be based on sustainable development approach. Sustainable development of hydro-economic complexes is defined by the сriterion of maintaining renewable water resources at acceptable levels and by water use efficiency. Conclusions. The authors suggest taking measures in order to rationalize water use basing on existing hydroeconomic systems and establishing cooperation with potential foreign institutions by creating a system of global national water complex through the institutionalization of water environment; the researchers offer to implement step-by-step decentralization and to create the interaction algorithm between the centralized and decentralized approaches to water supply in the municipal sector; they also recommend creating economic conditions for changeover to closed system in agriculture in order to save 1.8-2.5 thousand cubic meters of water per each hectare of irrigated, which will allow creating a more effective mechanism of water management in Ukraine with the use of the best foreign experience.