Analysis of present IWRM in the Upper Brahmaputra and the Upper Danube River Basins

摘要

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) is a process which strivestowards the sustainable management of water resources in river basins.The approach integrates insights and knowledge from various scientificdisciplines comprising natural, socio-economic, and engineering sciences.These three pillars of sustainability are important components of thisapproach integrating the environmental, economic and social dimension. Inthe ideal IWRM case planning is based on the river basin scale and thereforeis comparatively discussed herein for the two twinning BRAHMATWINN riverbasins, i.e. the Upper Danube River Basin (UDRB) in Europe and the UpperBrahmaputra River Basin (UBRB) in South Asia. In this chapter majorchallenges for the implementation of the IWRM process towards a sustainablemanagement of water resources in the two UDRB and UBRB twinning river basinsof the BRAHMATWINN project are analysed. The study revealed that in the UDRBthe IWRM approach is already part of water management planning and the implementation of the EU Water FrameworkDirective (WFD) is a good example in this regard. Contrary in the UBRBthe implementation of IWRM is just at the beginning phase, only recently isbeing discussed in the riparian states but has not been implemented in anyway so far on the basin scale.