Human Well-Being Values of Environmental Flows. Enhancing Social Equity in Intgrated Water Resources Management
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Author(s): K. S. Meijer
Publisher: IOS Press
ISBN: 9781586037321
Format: softback
194pp
Price: £41.00
Review Date: 07 December 2007
Review: During the last century the negative impact of upstream water resource development on downstream ecosystems became apparent and ther is a need to quantify environmental flow requirements. Environmental flows are the proportion of the natural flow regime that is maintained in a river, wetland or coastal zone to sustain ecosystems and the benefits that they provide for people. Various methods have been devised to quantify these requirements; but as yet no methods of quantifying such flows for human well-being are unavailable. This thesis aims to develop an approach for the assessment of human well-being values and social equity as related to environmental flows. For this, a conceptual model was drawn up to describe the relationship between human well-being, the river ecosystem and river flows. This model was then applied to two case studies: one on the Surma-Kushiyara river floodplains in Bangladesh, and the other on the Hamoun wetland in Iran.