Improved Decision-Making for Water Resources: The Key to Sustainable Development for Metropolitan Regions: Great Cities Institute/Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program Urban Water Resources Conference Proceedings

摘要

Water resources planning and management usually involves multiple stakeholders and attempts to achieve multiple objectives. This makes water resources planning a complicated, conflictual, and often ambiguous endeavor. Water resources planning and management, for example, often addresses water supply development, consumption, discharge, and irrigation by municipal, industrial and agricultural users. Planners attempt to balance water use and infrastructure needs among these diverse sectors so that most of the users consumptive objectives can be met at least cost and with minimal public investment. Typically, where there is plenty of water available, future population and employment growth are estimated for a service area and the resulting water demand is projected by sector and location. Water supply production, distribution, storage and treatment infrastructure is then sized to meet this projected demand with a margin of safety for drought or other disruptive events. Municipal and private water utilities then charge users for the finished water at rates sufficient to retire the bonds issued to pay for this needed infrastructure and to recover their annualized operational and maintenance expenses, plus provide a revenue stream to the municipality or utility.