Measurements Beyond River Health: Water Sustainability Assessment and River Sustainability Index

摘要

Water is one of our most critical resources: as populations and economies grow,water scarcity and degradation pose a growing threat to socio-economic development and environment protection.It has become more challenging but critical to provide adequate freshwater for the competing needs of human use,whilst at the same time managing the associated Long-term consequences and risks in the environment.The maintenance and restoration of healthy river systems have become important objectives of environment and water resources management.Integrated assessment is needed in order to understand these challenges and to manage water towards a sustainable future.Tools for river health assessment have been developed to measure the ecological status and natural capital of the river courses.Extending river health measurements to include socioeconomic values imbedded in water resources,this paper presents an indicator-based framework for assessing river sustainability.We discuss how sustainability indicators are applied to assess the specific concerns of water sustainability.In this paper we introduce our approach using the Process Analysis Method of sustainability assessment,which leads to a Composite River Sustainability Index for the Lower Yellow River in China.This methodology presents a systematic way to incorporate all domains of sustainability,and to generate a tailored indicator set.The paper concludes that a sustainability indicator framework provides a transparent and participatory basis for assessing river sustainability.Such assessments provide the information and overview that are needed for identifying critical issues,and are especially helpful in underpinning policy devdopment.