The impacts of environmental change on water resources

Water is one of the most important natural resources covering 75 percent of
the Earth's surface. It is a major component of living organisms contributing
to about 60 percent of the human body. Different European environmental
monitoring programmes confirm that the current land and water resources in
Europe are extremely vulnerable and subject to a range of external pressures.
Water management needs to be implemented with caution following thorough
evaluation. Therefore, it is crucial for the current generation to manage and
preserve water resources for future generations in a sustainable way. Current
human development patterns suggest that in the future there will be an
increase in population, population density and an increase in agglomerations.
These global change patterns (of land use and climate) add additional
pressures on water resources and it might increase probability of flood
events.

This problem has been recognized in recent years not only by scientists, but
also by policy makers. Therefore in October 2000, the European Parliament
adopted the Directive 2000/60 /EC (the EU Water Framework Directive-WFD).The
WFD defines the water management objectives that need to be reached in the
near future by the different member states of the EU. Since the use of natural
resources in a sustainable way is one of the priorities of the European
environmental agenda, sustainable exploitation and use of water resources is a
key objective of the WFD. The WFD adopts a holistic approach to river water
management and envisages the involvement of different actors in the design of
future water management plans. Furthermore, the principles of future water
management plans should be based on state-of-the-art knowledge of the
functioning of the hydro-system and should be based on the sustainable
exploitation of water resources. Unfortunately, the hydro-system is complex,
involving many compartments, processes, and boundary conditions which vary in
space and time. This makes the description of the evolution of the hydro-
system for alternative potential management scenarios a difficult task. In
such a context, the design of water resource management plans must inevitably
adopt a multidisciplinary, multi-participatory approach, considering the
pressures exerted by global change drivers and will be based strongly on the
use of hydrological models.