River Basin Restoration and Management

ABSTRACTRecently, the government of India has proposed the River Basin Management Bill, 2018. This Bill seeks to establish a River Basin Authority for the management and development of inter-state rivers and river basins in India. The Bill also seeks to entrench the tenets of Integrated River Basin Management in the Indian social and legal setup. This note attempts to normatively analyse the proposed Bill in light of the environmental justice principles, namely, distribution, participation and recognition. Through such analysis, this note argues that integrated river basin planning must not only focus on developing water resources but also human resources living within a river basin. This note also puts forth the proposition that water resource development within a river basin must be carried out taking into consideration the wider social, economic and political aspects of the people living within a basin area.

River basins are inherently complex systems comprising many interdependent components. Development activities undertaken without full consideration of the regional, social, environmental, and economic implications can and have had adverse repercussions. Management practices that respond to a single water use, a single population segment, or a single sector have caused inadvertent disruption to other uses, populations, and sectors. This review promotes a systems approach for developing and managing river basins. By including all critical components into a river basin plan, development and management objectives will be better met. To this end, we review integrated economic river basin models covering a wide range of issues, including water quantity and quality, environmental considerations, and conflicts at the sectoral, regional, and international levels. This synopsis characterizes the essential components of economic river basin modeling, provides guidelines for model specifications, and illustrates salient points with key examples from the literature.

The concept of “river basin management” calls for managing water resources at the river basin level in order to promote the sustainable use of water resources. Often the concept of river basin management is associated with the introduction of “river basin organisations” (RBOs) as special purpose organisations. However, in many developing countries, RBOs remain underfunded. Fiscal decentralisation involves shifting certain responsibilities for expenditures or revenues to lower levels of government. It usually involves a reallocation of functions and revenues so that functions are adequately funded. Fiscal decentralisation is supported by the principles of subsidiarity, disentanglement, cooperation, accountability and fiscal equivalence, with the latter asking for a congruence of those who pay for, who decide upon and who benefit from public goods. On the one hand, fiscal decentralisation can support RBOs if sufficient financial resources are allocated to them to fulfil their tasks. However, if RBOs are excluded from resources at the sub-national level, it can also be counterproductive and lead to increased competition with general-purpose jurisdictions at the sub-national level. <br> This discussion paper, therefore, asks the question of whether fiscal decentralisation supports or counteracts the funding of river basin management in the case of Mongolia, which has undergone parallel processes of institutionalising RBOs and of fiscal decentralisation in the last decade. In order to answer the overriding question, the paper analyses i) how competencies for various water governance functions between RBOs and other bodies at the sub-national level are formally allocated; ii) the funding arrangements in place for water-related functions of RBOs and other sub-national bodies; and iii) how RBOs and other sub-national authorities coordinate or compete for water governance funding, and what this implies for sustainable water resource use. The paper compares the responsibilities of national and various sub-national entities and assesses the extent to which the principles of disentanglement, cooperation, subsidiarity and accountability are applied in Mongolian water governance. It also analyses the formal and de facto funding sources and budgeting systems of the sub-national entities responsible for water management, in order to assess to what extent the principle of fiscal equivalence is realised. <br> The discussion paper finds that there is still considerable room for improving the realisation of the principles of disentanglement, cooperation, subsidiarity and accountability in the allocation of competencies in Mongolian water governance. At the sub-national level, a high number of actors are involved in water governance, and the allocation of various water governance functions between river basin authorities (RBAs), river basin councils (RBCs), Aimag environmental agencies (AEAs), and governors and assemblies at the levels of provinces (Aimags), districts (Soums) and communities (Bahgs) remains complex and convoluted. Despite a broad division of labour, a high level of overlap exists in terms of data management; monitoring water resources, water uses and law implementation; law enforcement; and to a certain degree the implementation of measures among these actors. <br> The principle of fiscal equivalence is also not fully realised in Mongolian water resources management. In terms of financing water governance, RBAs are primarily financed through the national budget and AEAs through sub-national province budgets. However, uncertainties exist regarding the allocation of water-use fees due to inconsistent legal provisions. In practice, available funds to RBAs only cover fixed costs. Thus, RBAs are largely assigned unfunded mandates for planning, monitoring and implementing water protection. This considerably limits the effectiveness of the river basin management approach. Overall, AEAs have somewhat higher budgets for environmental protection than RBAs. However, the case study shows, for example, that AEAs sometimes do not allocate any funds for water-related projects at all and do not necessarily earmark 35 per cent of water-use fees for environmental protection. <br> Furthermore, problems of underfinancing exacerbate problems of overlapping responsibilities. The inconsistent legal provisions on water-use fees have led to competition between AEAs and RBAs, which undermines trust between the different agencies and makes it more difficult to perform the tasks that they share as well as to coordinate on those tasks where their responsibilities overlap. Still, in the case analysed, recent first attempts have been undertaken to clarify responsibilities in Memorandums of Understanding. While the effectiveness of these Memorandums of Understanding should be subject to future research, they alone will hardly solve the problem of underfinancing. Therefore, the paper concludes that in Mongolia, fiscal decentralisation and the institutionalisation of river basin management are, so far, hardly mutually supportive, but rather competitive processes. It recommends a number of legal adjustments as well as the financial empowerment of RBAs and RBCs in order to support the sustainable use of water resources.

The majority of the world’s river basins do not adhere to political, geographical or human-imposed boundaries. Even in a large country such as the United States, where many large rivers cross state boundaries, each state may have different needs and requirements. The degree of uncertainty between expectations of varying interest groups becomes even more pronounced when a river crosses an international boundary. For example, the needs of upstream riparian residents may be completely different than those of downstream residents. In many cases, the countries may work out a reasonable solution to these difficult problems. Overall, it is prudent for all the concerned entities, states, and/or countries to follow some basic concepts and principles to develop a solution that is acceptable to all parties. The present paper outlines several such concepts and principles for management of large rivers such as the Kankakee and Mississippi Rivers in the United States, and the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers in Asia. A procedure also will be outlined to develop a reasonable, acceptable solution for integrated management of large river basins. River managers and engineers should keep in mind several points: each river basin is unique; river management must benefit people in the basin; priorities of various users may be differ; a basinwide institutional framework must be implemented; concepts and ideas must be developed for total river basin management; water in all forms must be shared among people in the basin; human health and environmental needs must be an integral component; and, finally, any and all management options must incorporate monitoring and data collection for use in the ultimate concept of “adaptive management.”

Since the issuance of Decree 1729 of 2002, the need for the management of watersheds and the concepts, objectives and scope of the corresponding management plans in the country was established. The final purpose of this exercise is to define and logically and coherently link the key concepts and variables necessary to address research focused on the organization and management of watersheds. In addition, verify the state of the art and determine future research needs. For its elaboration a recognition of the literature concerning the topic was carried out, an evaluation and follow-up of the progress reports delivered by each of the components, the conclusions that came out as a result of the weekly work tables of the technical and administrative teams, the design and reading of a format applied during the systematization of the experience, and the technical analysis of the guide for the river basin development and management plans. A conceptual framework was constructed with the terms of greatest importance to be managed by a team that participates in management processes during the various phases of a study. A clear conceptual framework allows to guide the research, provides a review to decipher and understand the results of the study and facilitates the production of new knowledge and the articulation between the technical teams for the fulfillment of the objectives during the development of river basin management plans (POMCA). Taking as a reference, the experiences lived during the execution of this study, it can be said that it is fundamental that in the preparation and during the beginning of the diagnosis, professionals hold conceptualization meetings so that the different products to be obtained show a joint participation from the different knowledge groups.

Numerous computer models for river basin planning and management have been developed and used extensively since the mid‐1970s. Early developments have relied on the use of network flow algorithms (NFA), due mainly to higher execution speed than the standard Simplex solvers. However, subsequent efforts to include proper modeling of hydraulic and hydrologic constraints introduced iterative schemes into the NFA‐based models, which diminished the initial advantages in execution speed and which also caused concerns over the accuracy of the convergence schemes. Hence full‐blown commercial linear programming (LP) solvers were introduced as a replacement to the iterative solution strategy of the NFA approach. This paper demonstrates one possible failure to solve a simple allocation problem using the NFA‐based model and shows how this problem can be solved using the standard LP approach. It then identifies cases when even a full‐blown LP approach cannot properly model two critical aspects of river basin management, one related to reservoirs with multiple outflows and the other one related to modeling of hydrologic channel routing. For NFA‐based models the failures are the result of the inability to include relationships between flows on different model components directly into the search process. For the models based on LP solvers, the failures are caused by the fact that integrated reservoir outflow capacity between the starting and the ending storage levels is assumed over the entire length of the assumed time step, while the actual outflow can only take place during the portion of the time step when the storage level is above the invert of the outlet structure.

There is a growing research interest on the transdisciplinary measurement of vulnerability to climatic hazards from the perspective of integrated river basin management. However, the incorporation of stakeholders’ participation, local knowledge and locally spatial characteristics into the process of such vulnerability assessment is one of the challenges faced by decision-makers, especially in developing countries. This article proposes a novel methodology for assessing and communicating vulnerability to policymaking at the river basin level through a case study of Tachia River basin in Taiwan. The authors used a multicriteria decision analysis to develop an integrated vulnerability index applied to a participatory geographic information system (GIS) to map vulnerability to climatic hazards. Using a GIS-based spatial statistics technique and multivariate analysis, we test the degree to which vulnerabilities are spatially autocorrelated throughout the river basin, explain why clustering of vulnerable areas occurs in specific locations, and why some regions are particularly vulnerable. Results demonstrate that vulnerable areas are spatially correlated across the river basin. Moreover, exposure, biophysical sensitivity, land uses and adaptive capacity are key factors contributing to the formation of localized ‘hot spots’ of similarly and particularly vulnerable areas. Finally, we discuss how the findings provide direction for more effective approaches to river basin planning and management.

The success of river and lake basin development and management is rooted in the knowledge of its resources, both physical and human. Within the framework of an integrated basin plan, each economic sector depends on the adequacy of such data for its individual development. The management and conservation of the basin itself in turn depends on knowing the requirements of those sectors and their probable impact on each other and on the status of the basin's resources, its ecology and environment. The development of African river basin resources is subject to various constraints, some for physical and climatic reasons, others tied to socio‐cultural characteristics and the priorities of national economies. These are reflected in financial, manpower and institutional limitations, problems of finding technologies suited to specific local conditions and concern for human health. The scale and complexity of river basin development make it difficult to predict precise outcomes of planned proposals, but a progressive approach which links long‐term activities with achievable, shorter term production projects offers prospects for ultimate success.

This study describes recent developments in the integrated and participatory approach applied to river basin management in Turkey. This document reviews what has been done so far, the current situation, and what remains to be done in Turkey. The concept of “River Basin Protection Action Plans” which will be converted to “River Basin Management Plans” has been examined and the efforts for participation of all stakeholders to decision and implementation phases have been defined. The projects, studies and improvements in the area of basin management have explained.

The institutionalization of River Basin Management as politics of scale – Insights from Mongolia

Network analysis of collaboration and information sharing in the management of the Lower Mekong River Basin

The implementation of the Water Framework Directive requires adjustment of the administrative structure for the water management in each of the Member States. Modifications of the procedures for river basin management are also foreseen. Today, river basin management in Denmark is for the most part carried out at regional levels (in 14 counties) and the environmental problems for freshwater systems in Denmark are mainly associated with diffuse pollution sources (primarily originating from agriculture) and pollution with pesticides and other xeno‐biotics. Viewed in the context of the Directive river basin models may play an important role for a successful water administration – being tools in the technical solutions for how to achieve “good status” for groundwater and surface waters. In Denmark integrated river basin modelling is used in connection with restoration projects, also empirical models are widely used. The benefits from applying river basin models are manifold. Besides being able to evaluate “good status” for freshwater bodies based on hydrology, land‐use, agricultural practices and ecology of individual river stretches (including lakes and wetlands), modelling can also identify solutions for flood/drought problems in combination with defining protection measures for the aquatic environment.

Evaluating participation in WFD river basin management in England and Wales: Processes, communities, outputs and outcomes

The global decline of water quality in rivers and streams has resulted in a pressing need to design new watershed management strategies. Water quality can be affected by multiple stressors including population growth, land use change, global warming, and extreme events, with repercussions on human and ecosystem health. A scientific understanding of factors affecting riverine water quality and predictions at local to regional scales, and at sub‐daily to decadal timescales are needed for optimal management of watersheds and river basins. Here, we discuss how machine learning (ML) can enable development of more accurate, computationally tractable, and scalable models for analysis and predictions of river water quality. We review relevant state‐of‐the art applications of ML for water quality models and discuss opportunities to improve the use of ML with emerging computational and mathematical methods for model selection, hyperparameter optimization, incorporating process knowledge into ML models, improving explainablity, uncertainty quantification, and model‐data integration. We then present considerations for using ML to address water quality problems given their scale and complexity, available data and computational resources, and stakeholder needs. When combined with decades of process understanding, interdisciplinary advances in knowledge‐guided ML, information theory, data integration, and analytics can help address fundamental science questions and enable decision‐relevant predictions of riverine water quality.

This paper outlines the importance of multiple time step optimization (MTO) in river basin allocation. The principal novelty of the work presented here is to provide a methodology for how to use MTO solutions in river basin planning and real-time operation. Two approaches for using the MTO results were tested on Damodar River basin in India and are presented in the paper. Using the proposed approach, the model managed flood flows without exceeding the downstream full bank channel capacity in 35 years of available historical data, while at the same time increasing generated hydropower on average by 63% annually, and supplying an additional 350 million m3 to irrigation and industry compared to the historical levels. The results presented in this study were obtained using the new Web-based Basin Management (WEB.BM) water management model, the only water allocation model with full Linear Programming (LP) optimization capabilities available online free of charge.